


only when the moon ripens, will you return to my side

by novae



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, like. a lot., spoilers up to 5b!, where once again a lot of liberties have been taken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-07-29 20:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 62,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7697827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novae/pseuds/novae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It snows the day Allison of the Argents dies. The earliest snowfall in a century, they say, but Lydia will not hear this. (soulmate + fantasy AU - spoilers up to 5b)</p>
            </blockquote>





	only when the moon ripens, will you return to my side

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt **soulmates** , for the 2016 stileslydiafest! thank you so much to the mods for organizing this amazing stydia festival! woohoo!
> 
> in other news: extremely (and by extremely i mean, extremely) loosely intertwined with 5b storyline and the fairytale the _six swans_. also, i honestly, honestly was not expecting this to turn out as long as it did - yikes. eternal thanks to my lovely beta **[sassystiles](http://sassystiles.tumblr.com/)** for putting up with my terrible ways! I ADORE YOU. 
> 
> i can also be found at **[braveprincesa](http://braveprincesa.tumblr.com/)** on tumblr, if anyone is ever interested on dropping on by! i love meeting new friends. :)
> 
> lastly, title is taken from "a season of waiting" by cecilia liu which I personally find a very fitting song for Lydia's overarching theme in this fic!
> 
> please enjoy!

**I. Deneb**  
_You neared me, never speaking_  
_Looking only at the heaving flanks of those that pulled my chariot_  
_Their gilded horns_  
_And I wanted to say to you,_  
_Look at me, instead_

 

* * *

 

 _L –_  
  
_Please! Forgive! Me! I know I promised I’d write nearly three months past – and, if anything, I have pored over every single word of every single letter you have sent me in the meantime. But things have been changing here, and for the worse. I will send Yannic along with a more satisfying letter as soon as I am able._  
  
_Darling, darling. I can imagine your face all too well as you read this. Please don’t be mad (or, at the very least, please don’t be too mad. By the time you receive this, I will have shamelessly run out of your biscuits again)._  
  
_Your dearest and most loyal friend,_  
_A_

 

* * *

 

 _L –_  
  
_I must say, you have outdone yourself with this batch! I gave one to Scott and he nearly broke a tooth, an extraordinary feat given his rumored tines of steel. It is very telling of your love for me, I’m sure._  
  
_Here is your lengthy update letter, as I’ve promised._  
  
_The others are doing well, for the most part. Scott is recovering nicely from a recent tumble and wanted to make sure I thanked you for the willow bark extract. Kira returned from her pilgrimage nearly a fortnight ago and mercy, you should see what she has learned, Lydia – it is nothing short of unbelievable. Even more progress for the ragtag team here, at the capital: Liam’s soulmate has finally come around to not kicking him in the shins every time she sees him, and Malia is hard at work learning orthography and – her personal favorite – arithmetic. I honestly suspect her to be learning it at this point solely so she can invent a way to leap back through time and murder Euclid._  
  
_I, too, am well! In fact, I think you will find it commendable that I have been enjoying naps several times a day now._  
  
_The problem then, as I’m sure you can deduce, lies with Stiles. Or, specifically, within him._  
  
_Ever since we – Scott, Stiles, and I – had our brief excursion into the underworld, he has not been the same. Matron Yukimura – Kira’s mother –   looked him over a while back and pronounced him as possessed by a malevolent spirit – one that has existed for over a thousand years. You are probably tired of hearing of these escapades of ours by now, I’m sure. Or, in the case of the underworld, see (I am still so, so sorry, Lydia – it had been so sudden, honestly). I know I’m tired of experiencing them, myself._  
  
_As of now, we have tried everything that could exorcise the spirit from Stiles without hurting him. Deaton even traveled beyond the Yukimura massif to retrieve wolf lichen that had grown from the blood of another similar spirit, but even that has failed. Scott hasn’t slept in days. I’ve given him all your lavender oil, but I think sheer will is keeping him up now. This is his best friend, he keeps insisting, and a large part of me understands. If it was you, Lydia, I wouldn’t even know how I would behave. But Scott – he is my soulmate too, Lydia, and seeing how terribly this affects him hurts me so much, sometimes, I forget everything else trying to remember how to breathe._  
  
_The other day, we managed to retrieve a shaman scroll from a mercenary named Kincaid, but the results were disappointing. ‘Change the host.’ As if we didn’t already know that – as if we haven’t already been trying that!_  
  
_Oh, Lyd. I don’t know what to do. I wish (not for the first time) you and that practicality of yours were here._  
  
_Yours,_  
_A_

 

* * *

 

_L –_

_How could I have ever doubted you? The answer being, of course, that I have never. If it were possible for me to efficiently pen my love for you, I would. Alas, even then it would take me at least thirty scrolls, and I cannot write too much – we are setting plans into motion tonight and the others are waiting impatiently as I speak._  
  
_But I wanted to say, at the very least: I love you, I love you, I love you!_  
  
_Devotedly and forever yours,_  
_A_  
  
_P.S. We all find ourselves in good health, especially heartened by the knowledge that Stiles will be likewise, soon enough. Worrying will only result in premature aging, my love, and if you must, may I recommend channeling this effort toward our garden children? Don’t forget to give my love to them!_  
  
_I will send you along the good news as soon as I am able. I can already hear you admonishing me not to count my eggs before they hatch but, well, you know me!_

 

* * *

  
  
The day Allison of the Argents dies, Lydia screams so loud that she, too, is buried cold and unfeeling beneath the earth.

 

* * *

  
  
Lydia is eight years of age when she has her first vision. It is a sharp and fuzzy thing, all at once, and horrendous. All she will remember from it is yelling, crying, and the breath of someone whispering into her ear, loud, and hot, and terrible, _If only –_  
  
When she comes to, she is in the cellar and her grandmother is rocking her gently with one arm, her other clamped over Lydia’s mouth. Lydia did not even realize she had been screaming.  
  
The first thing her grandmother does is give her a corner of sweetbread to nibble on. The second thing she does is pull down Lydia’s smallclothes. Checking for menarche, Lydia will understand only later.  
  
It is a pity those first drops of blood will not come until five years after. Her grandmother’s eyes tell her as much.

 

* * *

  
  
Before Lorraine of Martin disappears for the last time, she imparts two absolutes in her granddaughter: One, to never speak of what she has seen to whom she has seen. Two, to always keep her inheritance close.

 

* * *

  
  
There is something about firsts. Your first love, your first words, your first vision.  
  
Over the years, the lattermost fades in and out of focus, of possibilities. Sometimes, it is accompanied by the scent of blood and smoke. Other times, it occurs in absolute silence. But regardless, this is always the same: a flash of constellations and eyes, flickering and lighter than honey.  
  
The words, however, grow only sharper.  
  
First, it is only _If only._ Then, over gradual months and years, _If only you_ –  
  
It is only when she is ten that she realizes who it is, dying with unsaid regrets in her arms.  
  
_If only you weren’t my soulmate._

 

* * *

 

 **Naturalis Historia**  
_**SOULMARK**_  
_The hallmark of the human species is the soulmark, which effectively distinguishes humans from both animals and the creatures that venture from beyond the veil. In her_ Oratorium, _Kalliope provides what is perhaps the most popular account of how soulmarks came to be. She mentions that long ago, when the world had only just begun, the sun and the moon fell in love. But alas, the sheer incompatibility of their celestial natures rendered the lovers only able to catch glimpses of the other as they moved across the heavens. In its wake, the sun left behind words that scorched and burned until the moon could no longer hold them and, instead, cast them into the night sky. There, they become constellations, forever preserved as a reminder of a lover’s devotion. The moon, in turn, would plant whispers as it trailed across the sky, but, come morning, the sun’s blistering nature would only dissipate the words into mists and clouds. And so it was the sun that carved the first word into man and vowed to protect this still-young and fragile species, such that the precious words of its own lover would never be forgotten._

_Soulmarks consist of the first words one soulmate addresses directly to the other. This can be accomplished either through an oral or written method, and the average soulmark is between five to six words in length. It has been well-documented that a person who is born before their soulmate will receive their soulmark only when the respective soulmate is born. However, there is considerable debate as to when a soulmark first appears on a person who is born after their soulmate. Naturalists believe that it appears at the beginning of gestation while proponents of Internalisationism argue that it appears by the end of the infant’s second year. Evidence exists for both theories, but objective truth is made difficult by the fact that soulmarks remain solely visible to the owner until said aloud by the intended soulmate. Only then will it become visible to others – a process that is often painful and seems to have originally been designed to promote skinship; that is, the soothing touch of one’s soulmate. While perhaps not so carnal today, it still remains true that a soulmark that is not properly consummated with either physical or emotional bonding can often lead to infection and even death. Likewise, a soulmark that lives past the death of a soulmate has the potential of becoming necrotic if not suitably cared for. Plenty of lore and regional distinctions have evolved to explain these observances and the more common ones can be found summarized further below._

_It is also not uncommon for one to live their lives without the appearance of a soulmate..._

 

* * *

 

Lydia’s mark is a tiny, cramped thing that scrawls itself across the slope of her left hip. It is four measly words, sixteen letters, and, as far as she can tell, utterly bereft of any meaning. Not like Allison’s which (apparently) curves her right inner wrist and says, _Milady, let me see if I have better luck._  
  
But it is these same four words and sixteen letters that have always given Lydia a small burst of pride. And _wonder._ To know that her soulmate – her _soul_ ’s mate – is out there, with their messy handwriting and imperfections and waiting for _her_ .  
  
The words have been with her as long as she can remember, as much a constant as the stars in the sky or the curl of her hair no matter how hard she tries. Grandmother says that this means whoever her soulmate is has been alive just as many years as her, or perhaps even longer. Lydia is just happy they are _alive_ and that, maybe, they will like her enough to always be her friend.  
  
So it is this raised, bumpy impression, privy to only the underside of her fingertips, that she feels when she learns to count the breaths separating lightning and thunder, when the other children rebuke her for her hair and heritage, whenever her grandmother disappears without warning only to come back days later with tired eyes and small souvenirs.  
  
Until Lydia is ten and realizes who it is, dying with unsaid regrets in her arms.

 

* * *

  
  
_Christopher –  
  
Lydia had her first vision earlier this morning and had to be taken down to the cellar, where no one would hear her. This incident has me vindicated, then, in my decision to take her away from N., though I wish this had not been the case. Never have I witnessed abilities budding so young – she has not even reached her menarche which is when an oracle’s abilities first begin to manifest. I plan on teaching her the creed immediately, and my only solace is that L. is a smart girl and wise beyond her years.  
  
Also, please thank Gerard for the mountain ash mixture. It runs quite nicely around the property and it is comforting, especially now, to see that there are no leaks in the barrier. I’ve sent him a small token of appreciation – you should find it with the next carriage that arrives. As he knows, there is no wood stronger than that of hickory.  
  
\- Lorraine  
_

 

* * *

  
  
**II. Sadalsuud  
** _You call to me_  
_But I cannot meet your eyes_  
_I glance into the rivers of heaven_  
_My love, I have looked your way_  
_And am brighter for it_

 

* * *

  
  
It has been two-hundred and seventy-six days. Two-hundred and seventy-six days she has begged reprieve from the world. Two-hundred and seventy-six days she has gone without seeing another soul. Two-hundred and seventy-six days she has continued to exist since witnessing the last light being extinguished a thousand miles away.  
  
She has a hard time differentiating her grandmother from Allison these days, but tonight they are both whispering, _it’s time, Lydia_.  
  
And so Lydia may needlessly trim the wick twice, might crouch for minutes at a time between adjacent shelving racks, but this is what she ultimately does: she goes and unlatches the door.  
  
Outside, the moon is bright enough to startle her into forgetting any light provided by her lamp. Her feet take her down a well-worn path now overtaken with fennel and weeds, their roots lattices that press up against the undersides of her feet. The grass that had once been neatly trimmed and sequestered brushes high against her ankles, the backs of her calves. It is they that rule the fields, the gardens, and the dirt roads, and an army of crickets and moths rise indignantly around Lydia as she passes, a clear destroyer of the peace.  
  
She reaches the outer wooden fence and almost forgets how to unlock the gate – is left numbly reciting motions with her hands until she can slip through a crack, splinters snagging against her fingers and into the folds of her dress. She follows the trail of moonlight and Allison’s voice up, up the gently sloping hill outside the property, where two girls used to roll down until they were covered in grass and breathless laughter.  
  
It is when she nears the top that she sees. A dark, solitary speck above her, framed against the stars and no bigger than the birthmark on her thumb, but it is enough.  
  
“Yannic,” she says, the name no louder than her exhale. **  
**  
Overhead, a shriek sounds, long and lonely. Slowly, the dot circles lower and lower, until she can make out the curve of its beak, the white streaking the underside of one wing.  
  
Something wells up in her then. It stretches from her toes, up her chest, aching and terrible and wretchedly _alive,_ all at once.  
  
She holds out her arm, not caring when those sharp talons dig past the remnants of her gown, into her skin. She only cares to hold him tight against her, warm and breathing and still somehow _Allison’s_. She holds him tight only to let go, in the same breath.

 

* * *

  
  
This, then, is how the horse with a single, unconscious rider finds its guide:  
  
Being held tight against a phantom of a girl as she cries two-hundred and seventy-six days of heartache and the realization of loss into the falcon’s ruffled feathers.  
  
In the far distance, a wolf howls.

 

* * *

  
  
The boy Lydia pulls from the horse is devastatingly normal in and of himself, despite impressive wounds staining his side and leg. His horse, however, is magnificent. It is light and easily fifteen hands, its coat a burnished chestnut with dark-pointed ears and hooves equally skittish. But with quiet gestures, stale sugar lumps, and the tucking of her hair beneath a shawl, Lydia is able to grasp the reins and distract it enough to lead it to a spare fencepost a little ways from the outer fence. She unsaddles it next, hangs the heavy equipment over a large, nearby rock, and lugs the remaining bags into the house – briefly contemplating whether the equine is more a pack mule than a warhorse – before returning to water and curry the now considerably less agitated mount.  
  
She thinks it is telling of her physical condition that she finds herself covered with a fine layer of sweat by the time she is through.  
  
In the house, the boy has not moved from the position she left him in but a similar sheen of perspiration covers him too. His fever has broken, then. She places the back of her hand across his forehead, wipes at his head and neck, and finds herself watching the sun shrink from the still-open doorway. Soon she will stir, will need to rise and light the lamps, but for now she considers only what she has done, who she has ended up with lying half-dead in what remains of her grandmother’s sitting room.  
  
Later, when she is feeling dust-coated kitchen drawers for dried turmeric, she will pause to wonder about the color of his eyes.

 

* * *

 

The boy wakes the following morning, following a change of his dressings.

As Lydia watches, his eyes flutter open, as warm and drowsy as liquid sunrise. A soft grunt escapes his throat.  
  
She ignores the question tucked into the sound and stands. In the kitchen, she pours cold spring water into a tin cup. She tucks the cup rim between his lips, tilts it so he is forced to take a sip. He does so, coughing.  
  
Once he’s caught his breath, his mouth parts, rounding at the ends as if to ask a question. She gives him another sip.  
  
It is only when he has emptied the entire cup that her hands retreat.  
  
“My god,” the boy says, aloud. The better half of his upper shirt is wet. He stares down before looking up at her, half-incredulous, half-reproachful.  
  
What he does not know is that _she_ does not know how to care for others. Particularly her bedside manner, as was mentioned several times that one winter when Lydia had been the only soul around to nurse a feverish Allison back to health. Lydia glances down at this half-drowsy boy and wonders if he is any better off for having stumbled into her arms.

 

* * *

  
  
The boy falls into slumber not long after. When he awakens, the afternoon shadows have grown long and weary, and Lydia escapes to where his horse is tied. She stops by the well to draw water for its makeshift trough and smiles at the feeling of its lips nosing over the palm of her hand. It is almost enough to make her want to win over its affections with sugar and herbs, to saddle and ride it far enough away that merely the sun shining on her face will be enough to create contentment within her.  
  
Instead, Lydia hunts for wild-growing calendulas before sitting in the calf-thick grass and plucking clovers to weave chains with.  
  
When she returns to the house, the moon has drawn her curtains and an oil lamp can be seen burning through the sitting room window. The boy, however, has disappeared.  
  
His bags have been opened, and on her grandmother’s most favored writing desk lies a scattering of parchment, maps, an opened book, a myriad of strings and wool skeins dangling off all sides. It has arguably become the messiest space in the house in a matter of hours.  
  
It has arguably become the brightest and she is nothing if not a fool, drawn, a moth to flame.  
  
The maps are of the kingdom, some detailed with every mountain peak, others with the thinnest-marked alleys. Of considerably more interest, however, is the book. The open pages contain crude illustrations and cramped notes, afterthoughts scribbled into and around the margins. A system of multicolored strings has been sewn between comments and drawings.  
  
It is, she realizes, a sort of map in and of itself. Her finger reaches out to touch the madder-dyed string linking _phases_ to _frequency_ –  
  
“Red is for unsolved.”  
  
She turns to see him in the doorframe, watching her. The ends of his hair curl wet, dripping down onto his shoulders. She knows now where he has been and will know every single detail of this moment for the rest of her life – how his eyes shift just so in firelight, the wary curve of his mouth as he studies her.  
  
_Red is for unsolved._ Slowly, steadily, she glances away, back at the tangled web, and ignores the brushfire spreading across the inner enclave of her hip.  
  
I know, she wants to tell him. I know.  
  
She has known for seventeen years.

 

* * *

  
  
_L –  
  
I don’t even know where to begin. No doubt you’ll be hearing the rumors any moment now, so I wanted to send this with Yannic before the rest of the world comes falling over onto your doorstep.  
  
I am sitting at my desk as I pen this, feeling inexplicably like I’ve gone to see a priest. My only solace in ‘confessing’ to you is that, at the very least, you won’t be able to stalk after me with those disapproving eyes. You are much too far away. Also, please be advised that I still remain unspeakably distraught over the demise of my lovely turnips. If you abandon the rest of our children now to come stalk after me, I will never forgive you.  
  
Ah, but, Lyd – the rumors are all true. Even the one about the ballroom. For the record, I haven’t the slightest idea how it was released. Are you very shocked? I know I am. Though I don’t know what else one is supposed to feel, when they’ve gone and met their soulmate_ _. Especially when he’s – well, you know. Who he is. And if you still don’t, you will soon. For the first time in my life I find myself relying on the words of Master Finstock, an exercise that is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds.  
  
But, what’s more, last night I couldn’t sleep and so I was up with the sunrise. I sat on my usual ledge overlooking the castle grounds and, well. It is the afterglow speaking in part, I’m sure, but as I sat there and watched the light creep over the farthest trees it wasn’t as though the world was different altogether, not as the poets are so wont to wax. And yet, in some strange way, I find myself understanding why they would compose such terribly saccharine lines._ _  
  
The whole world seems to have shifted, Lydia, even though everything remains the same – the scenery around me, the trajectory of the sun, who I am and how I think. But now it is as if my world has shifted the barest degree, has widened just so, to allow room for another heart in mine.  
  
I suppose, if anything, it is like Ardené said,  
_

_The branches of the tree rustle and groan,_  
_Forever destined to reach skyward_  
_So does my heart unfurl ever wider,_  
_Your words sweeter than hyacinth,_  
_Blooming as this stagnant world watches_

 _I must confess, part of me penned the entire verse out because of its relevance, but mostly because I know the grief it will cause your mind upon reading it. Should I quickly remind you again about how distraught I am over the premature death of my turnips?  
  
Neither my loving and good father nor my equally loving family yet knows. I expect this will change unspeakably soon if not already, seeing as we created quite the spectacle yesterday. If I ever stop responding to your letters at any time within this month or the next, you will know the reason.  
  
With love always,  
A  
  
P.S. He is slightly comparable to an overeager pup. It’s a bit endearing.  
  
I’m in trouble, aren’t I?_ _  
_

 

* * *

  
  
Sometime in the middle of the night, Lydia awakens. The oil burns low on the lamp stand beside her, a testament of hours lapsed. But something else, too, is different.  
  
Slowly, she sits up, lowers her feet onto the hard-packed floor and finds herself setting her teeth against the sharp flare of her side, a reminder raw enough to send her shaking to even consider it. Instead, she rises from her bed, surveys the root cellar and makes certain that the trapdoor leading down is still barred, the shelves lining the sod-covered walls hold their contents in the positions she has memorized them. She has had more than enough days to memorize this small, underground room, to commit to memory the distance between each of the packages on the shelves, the pathways of all the twenty-one cracks in the ceiling, to calculate the rate at which dirt drips down on a sunny and a rainy day, all in hopes of burying the images of Allison in her last moments, of her mouth parting in surprise, the _drip-dripping_ of blood leaking from her chest, her stomach and her mouth – the blood leaking from _his_ –  
  
Lydia shoves open the small, wooden window.  
  
A curl of cool air brushes the back of her neck and she clenches her hands against the sill, forces herself to close her eyes and listen to the soft sounds of night, the pensive hooting of owls, the chirping of crickets.  
  
And in the distance, a lower whicker. The horse, she thinks, and –  
  
Another, now, faint and uneasy.

 

* * *

  
  
_Christopher –  
  
Yes, Allison may come and stay. Stories of Deucalion and his pack have reached even these southern borders, so you know just how infamous he has become. The barrier Gerard gave all those years back has long served its purpose without any mishaps, so your Allison will be safe here.  
  
Moreover, Allison is a nice girl, and it would do Lydia good to have some company her age. The children from the village have long grown old enough to internalize society’s definition of normal and what is not, and it hurts L. every time although she refuses to acknowledge this. I suppose this is another way in which she takes after my side of the family. Despite this, she has always had an interest for the company of outsiders that I have never been able to understand, but it will not matter in the end. I've long taught her the basics, and she will soon realize for herself how heartless the world outside this home can be. Even now, she hardly wanders outside the barrier anymore.  
  
Importantly, C., you know me to be a frank, unapologetic individual and I will not disappoint you. As such, Allison may come and stay on these conditions:  
_

  1. _She must be well-educated on the circumstances and occupation of this family._
  2. _She must never be allowed to disclose any information about Lydia or I that she learns during her stay here._
  3. _While I am still alive, I will be the head of this household. She should understand that any persuading of hers to have Lydia believe otherwise will not be tolerated. This includes but is not limited to the rules I have already set in place. For instance, she must not convince L. to meander off the property without my explicit permission._
  4. _Above all, during her stay here, she must never allow L. to engage in any conversation that would lead to a divulging of Words._



_I have every faith that you will instruct Allison on these matters prior to her arrival.  
  
-Lorraine  
_

 

* * *

 

The heralding of autumn is accompanied by a brisker night and Lydia tucks her shawl firmly under her chin and her grandmother’s heavy cane under her arm, shields the lamp from any wayward breeze, and scurries across toward the dark, outlined mass of the horse. Something, somewhere, has already spooked it and when she approaches, a shrill, startled sound escapes its mouth. Both parties rear back instinctively.  
  
“Shhh,” she whispers, heart thudding, and wishes she still had some sugar in that old sack grandmother had left behind. As it is now, she can only offer the palm of her hand, empty and damp with nerves concealed otherwise. The nervous creature steps back in response, ears pricking, and Lydia realizes then that near eighteen years and she has no real understanding of other creatures, whether it be dogs or horses or, a more recent discovery, humans. Allison would have laughed herself sick.  
  
A pang shoots through Lydia’s heart so that her fingers almost curl back into her palm.  
  
But at that moment, in some small act of mercy, the horse decides to take pity on her and politely _whuff_ s a hot breath over the proffered, sticky palm.  
  
Lydia cautiously reaches to pet a dark, soft cheek. She then – slowly – sets her lamp atop an adjacent fencepost and is in the midst of contemplating whether to lead the horse closer towards the house when she sees it.  
  
Far beyond the outermost fence encircling her grandmother’s property is a dark, red glow.  
  
When Lydia had been younger, her grandmother had explained how the surrounding woods were haunted by will-o’-wisps, had said, _we aren’t the only ones out there that people are afraid of, Lydia. We are but a drop in a larger ocean, and so you must promise me to always keep within the outer gates._  
  
Lydia stares at the red glow now, and it isn’t as if she will cross the barrier – yet, nevertheless, a drop of morbid fascination lights within her – the same one that had roomed within her as a child when she doubted the possibility of luminosity ever being dangerous. Light, she had thought, was what gave the kingdoms their victors and victories. It was the dark that everyone feared. Now, she knows better, she thinks. Now, she knows that light gained and light lost did more damage than any darkness ever could.  
  
Absently, Lydia gives the horse a few more pats of reassurance – for both parties involved – and slowly moves one step closer toward the outer fence. Behind her, the horse voices its dissent.  
  
“Shh,” she tells it. Carefully, she takes another step.  
  
A few more, and she is close enough to see the red glow separating into two. It is then that she realizes she would much rather have the twin flames as will-o’-wisps.  
  
They are _eyes_.  
  
Lydia doesn’t feel herself move, but suddenly she is grasping grandmother’s cane with both hands.  
  
Too late does she remember: staring directly into any _canidae_ ’s eyes is nothing if not a direct violation of hierarchy. And she only remembers because the creature slinking out from the shadows toward them is little more than shadow itself.  
  
When she was younger, her grandmother would curl her up on stormy nights and tell her about the patron hound of crossroads and crows. “It is bigger, bigger than the largest wolf even, with eyes that glow red and fur blacker than the darkest night. Some even say that in the end of days, it will have grown big enough to swallow the sun’s beloved.”  
  
Other children may not have been appreciative of this bedtime story, but for Lydia there had always been a certain comfort in the telling. Perhaps it was the way grandmother would spin the yarn or perhaps it was because there is a certain camaraderie that comes with being labeled consorters of death, but younger Lydia had always wondered if the hound and she – if they could be friends. Especially in those years before Allison.  
  
When the beast slams into the mountain ash barrier hard enough to crack a nearby tree, Lydia finds herself rethinking this puerile childhood dream. The aftershock is enough to send her stumbling backward and, behind her, the horse rears, long and shrill.  
  
“Oh, shh!” Lydia hisses, wanting very much to shriek herself.  
  
Still, the barrier holds and the beast, too, is thrown against the backdrop of trees. It lands on its feet, a thrashing of limbs and snarls loud enough to worm into the marrow of her bones.  
  
“ _Scott!_ ”  
  
Lydia looks back. A figure stands in the light of the doorway, supported against its frame. She turns back to the beast and almost bares her teeth at it.  
  
At the sound of the boy’s voice, however, the beast lets loose a long, desperate howl.  
  
Slowly, frantically, the boy reaches where she is. In the dim moonlight, moisture lines his forehead from the effort alone, drops of perspiration sliding down his temple. He isn’t paying attention to any of this, however; his eyes are fixed on the beast and it is consternation that thickens his voice. “ _Scott._ That’s Scott. That’s – he’s – ”  
  
The force with which Lydia pulls him back is hard enough to yank the collar of his thick, linen shirt over one shoulder. She ignores both this and his scandalized protest and shakes her head angrily. In the background, the beast wails. Moments later, another reverberating boom.  
  
The boy looks at her sharply then, says, “You have mountain ash?” and she tugs at him again when he tries to step forward.  
  
“All right, all right,” he says eventually, holding up his hands under duress. She is pulling the back of his shirt hard enough to tear and he cranes his head to look at her as if _she_ is the strangest creature currently among them.  
  
“I won’t step over,” he tells her, contrition and coaxing rolled into one tone. “And I’ll keep watch. So you can go back to sleep now.”  
  
Lydia has never heard such a preposterous statement. She stares at him long enough to convey as much without words, and then she huffs and stalks back into the house. Unsurprisingly, there are no carrots or apples in the kitchen, but a small drawer hides the last of grandmother’s herbs – lavender, birch leaf, chamomile. She stashes these into her dress pockets along with what remains of the seabiscuits from her cellar. In the drawing room, she rolls up the sheets and quilts, tossing them over a shoulder. It is through sheer stubbornness that her knees don’t give under the weight.  
  
And so, armed with such, she stalks back across the pasture.  
  
The boy loiters near the outer fence – _too close, too close,_ the brand on her skin throbs – looking for all the world as if he is having a conversation with the hulking beast that paces a mere few feet away, on the other side. He glances up as she approaches, gaze sharp – only to widen in alarm as he takes her in. Before something undoubtedly dumb can leave his mouth, she throws the sheets over his head. He topples backward. The creature snarls. By the time the boy claws his way out, she has spread a quilt over the damp night grass, nestled between the larger roots of a nearby tree.  
  
She points to his wounds and mimics wrapping herself in a blanket, glaring pointedly until he complies.  
  
“You er, don’t talk much, do you?” he says, watching as she digs through her pocket for the dried pouch of chamomile. She opens up the pouch for his inspection, then points to his horse who has been quietly and steadily growing more anxious.  
  
“Oh,” he says, even as his eyes brighten, and Lydia tries very hard not to shrink back when he regards her with what could almost be a ghosting of appreciation. “He loves them.”  
  
So Lydia quickly absconds toward his horse, who shows enough delight at the dried handful of flowers that it allows her to run her hand across its trembling, sweaty mane. But soon the chamomile is gone and she cannot stay here finding solace in a horse when there is another pouch hanging as heavily in her pocket, and so she pets the equine one last time before heading to where the boy now sits beneath the tree.  
  
She cautiously lowers herself next to him – a large, protruding root extending between them – and when he tears his eyes away from the beast standing on the other side of the barrier, she presents him with the contents of her other pouch: a crushed mixture of lavender and birch leaves. He stares at both it and her dubiously – rightly so, she thinks with some relief – and so she presses him silently to retrieve a small pinch from the weathered bag. Once he does, she takes the leaves from him and pops them into her mouth, chewing openly before swallowing. _Safe,_ she assures, and thrusts the rest of the pouch at him, pointing to his wounds. He sniffs at it and whatever scent he catches causes his nose to wrinkle instinctively. Lydia only reaches over, takes another sprinkling, and eats this one too – watches from the corner of her eye as, finally, wearily, the boy follows suit.  
                 
“ _Blrgh,_ ” he coughs out not nearly a moment later, and then he is looking at her as if she has betrayed him, the disbelief clear in his eyes. Lydia only blinks up at the moon, trying to extricate the bit of birch leaf stuck between two molars and wishing she had stopped at the well for some water. She had never mentioned the taste as being enjoyable.

 

* * *

  
  
Lydia wakes with half an inhale left in her lungs. Early sunlight streams into her eyes when she opens them and she shifts to feel the coarse tree trunk against her back. There is a sour, anxious churning in her stomach and it takes her a few, bleary moments to remember why – and then she is scrambling up, glancing with a sharp intake at the boy who had still been awake last time she had woken up.  
  
He is asleep now, head tucked into one shoulder and curled up at the base of the tree. Her hand reaches out involuntarily, haltingly, as if he will spook like his horse, and swaddles the quilt tighter around him. That one touch is enough for the warmth emanating from him to seep into her fingertips and diffuse through her chest, and Lydia is hurriedly straightening, directing her attention to what lies beyond that fence, the pulse pounding loudly in her ears.  
  
As she approaches the barrier, there is no visible trace of the shadowed creature from the night before. There is, however – a little ways into the distance – a strange, almost olive-colored heap lying motionless in the grass. Carefully, Lydia props her palms onto the wooden railing and heaves herself upward for a closer look –  
  
Facedown and half-buried among the grasses and weeds, lies a boy. The second one, she cannot help but think hysterically, to arrive unconscious at her doorstep in two days. But unlike the boy currently asleep against the tree, this one is naked.  
  
For a bleary few seconds, Lydia stares.  
  
Then she is turning, running back to the other boy, who awakens with a litany of grunts and half-formed questions, lashes sticking together. In the morning light, his eyes are as soft and sleepy as slow-drip molasses. She anxiously pats at his shoulder, supports his weight on her own until they are both stumbling to where the grass is still bent from her earlier weight.  
  
He stops so suddenly Lydia is nearly sent headlong into the dirt and she scowls up at him. He pays her no heed.  
  
“Scott,” he breathes, and that brief shard of pain from last night is digging itself into Lydia’s stomach. For Lydia may be circumventing, but she has never been one to deny a convergence of truths. She had not that night when those four, fateful words were said to her, and she cannot now.  
  
So as the boy beside her, too impatient for gates, leaps over the fence – injured leg and all – wood creaking ominously in its old age – to slip an arm under his friend’s, help prop him upright, Lydia steps back and studies this familiar stranger: The boy-king, youngest to rule in a century. The true alpha, who bested Peter the Mad at his own game. Scott, descendant of Cathmhaol, a part of whom Lydia’s best friend carries with her even now. Lydia studies him and sees a boy, his shoulders world-weary, his hair matted with dirt and blood. Grime creases the corners of his eyes as he listens to what his companion has to say.  
  
He then makes the mistake of glancing up and catching her stare. His eyes widen in alarm.  
  
“Er,” he says, and looks to his friend.  
  
“Because you’re naked,” said friend supplies. Both he and Lydia then watch as the boy-king’s flush begins, violent and violet, spreading from as low as his navel. Lydia wonders if this was something Allison knew, if her friend had spent time mapping the exact pathway.  
  
The boy-king grows redder and redder, and it is the scribe who takes pity on him, says, “Stay here,” and limps back across the borderline – the longer route, this time.

 

* * *

  
  
The boy-king, naturally, cannot cross the barrier. Lydia cannot fight truths but she can circumvent them, and some deep-seated part of her is tempted to wash her hands, to deny the king – her, deny the _king_ – entry and watch as both him and his scribe – because the latter is his scribe and not anything of hers – _cannot_ be – inevitably disappear from sight.  
  
But a larger part of Lydia thinks of Allison and how she had defied all logic and blood for this young ruler in front of her, how her letters to Lydia did not go once without mentioning him in some way. How _much_ she had loved him – still loves him, his words surely imprinted on the inner curve of her right wrist even now – and how fond Lydia had grown of him in turn. How glad and envious, all at once, that he could be the cause of Allison’s happiness.  
  
So Lydia digs into the ground beneath the gate and uncovers the hollow, silver vessel running the perimeter of the property. She carefully wedges open a portion of the silver casing, scoops out enough of the mountain ash packed inside so that the boy-king can slip through.  
  
The ruler of the kingdom is all shy gratitude and apologies and, as Lydia reforms the barrier, her heart cannot be anything but assuaged in the decision that garners dirt, thick and staining, beneath her fingernails.  
  
From behind her, the boy-king says all to brightly, “Oh, hey! Roscoe.”  
  
“About as old and useless as the last time you saw him,” the scribe replies.  
  
“But still alive.”  
  
“Yeah, the bastard.” Lydia is pretty sure that’s fondness she hears in his voice.

 

* * *

 

Scott comes into the kitchen, fresh-faced and scrubbed red, smelling sharply of lye. He wears what could be salvaged of Lydia’s grandfather’s clothing: an overshirt that pinches his shoulders and sides, and breeches that cut off before his ankles. Lydia’s grandfather had not been the tallest man by his wife’s account.  
  
But the boy standing before her with his ducked head and hunching of the shoulders looks uncomfortably close to saying _thank you,_ so Lydia tilts her head pointedly down the hallway where his friend is asleep. She moves aside to let him slip past and, after a moment of hesitancy, he does.  
  
Alone, Lydia carefully sits on a nearby bench, folds her hands in her lap in the closest semblance to normalcy, and looks around her. Sunlight filters in through the open kitchen window, highlighting swirling columns of dust. The rest of the house is filled with the motes, too, undoubtedly – she has heard the scribe sneezing in his sleep. Cobwebs hang from the rafters and darker corners, decorating rusting pots and pans. The hearth lies cold and blackened, having long been abandoned to the mercies of nature.  
  
She sits and thinks about the other rooms in the house – the quilts and coverings that need washing, airing. The floors that need scouring, the furniture that needs wiping. How, once, long before Lydia, the manor had bustled with footsteps and busy hands. Back when the prosperity of the family Martin was enough to justify any strangeness of blood.  
  
She thinks about the scribe with his injured leg, resting in the drawing room. About the boy-king, pacing relentlessly between adjacent rooms, undoubtedly used to ones larger than the house in its entirety.  
  
But mostly, Lydia sits and thinks about how strange it is, to hear footsteps that do not belong to her.  
  
  
  
By the time Lydia has scrubbed the hearth clean enough for her liking and is contemplating the dust and grit coating the hallways, both boys have awakened and retreated into the drawing room, voices hushed. She catches stray threads of the conversation without meaning to: “I don’t _remember,_ Stiles – ” “ – have to return – let Deaton know – ” “ – the others might – ”  
  
Lydia is in the kitchen once more, standing on the highest stool and battling a particularly obstinate cobweb, when the two appear in the doorway. The boy-king, startled, is quick to duck his head and flash her a small smile. In his hand is a tightly wound scroll. “Hello. Er. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Yannic?”  
  
She gestures toward the beech tree, its branches made partially visible by the kitchen window. He thanks her before heading out the backdoor, his friend half a pace behind. As they go, Lydia feels the passing brush of eyes upon her, but when she looks down she only sees the top of the scribe’s head as he follows his leader out the backdoor.

 

* * *

  
  
They beg one more night from her.  
  
If the boy-king had a cap, he would have surely coffered it in this moment. His eyes are no less earnest as he beseeches her from across the kitchen table and – _an overeager pup._ The thought passes, unbidden, through her. “Only if it does not inconvenience you,” the boy is saying, “Mistress – uh, forgive me, I am not familiar with your name, given or familial, yet – I apologize for not introducing myself earlier. To those around me, I am known as Scott, son of Melissa of the line Delgado. And this is my oldest friend and scribe, byname Stiles, birth name – ”  
  
“ – inconsequential, seeing that he insists on being called Stiles.”  
  
They then turn to look at her, and the unspoken question on their faces could not have been clearer if they had given voice to it. Lydia carefully studies the way her hands fold on the wooden grain of the table, how each finger remains firm and unyielding despite the way she is shaking inside. _Lydia,_ she could say, but there is not one person left alive who knows this name, who still calls her by it. Lydia, who was buried the same day Allison was, who only knew how to love two people. Lydia, whose grandmother whispers in her ear, _never let the world understand who you are_. Lydia, who lies awake most nights, afraid to dream.  
  
So, instead, she rises from her seat and gestures for them to follow her, down the hallway, into the living room. There, amongst the disarray of books, parchment, and other sundries – more than once has Lydia caught glimpses of steel glinting from within one bag – she locates the regional map she has seen them using. Spreading it out against the wall, she points to a small, nearly faded print, and Scott reads, slowly, “Martin,” before lifting his eyes to regard her.  
  
Lydia merely inclines her head.

 

* * *

  
  
The boy-king – _Scott_ – insists on helping prepare the food, only to realize that there is not much to prepare.  
  
“Er,” he says, looking down the empty grain cask, “I don’t suppose you have another barrel.” She doesn’t. Scott nods, “Is there a garden,” he begins, only for his friend to lean forward on both forearms to catch Lydia’s eyes.  
  
“Is there a village nearby?” Stiles asks.  
  
Lydia nods. Scott glances at his friend and a look of understanding catches tinder in darker eyes. He opens his mouth.  
  
“Could – would it trouble you to direct us onto the main path? There are a few items we’d like to purchase.”

 

* * *

  
  
She leads them across the fields – pausing only briefly to once again break the barrier – and then through a heavy patch of woodland, until they arrive at the edge of the main village. Here, she stops and they with her, still blanketed by the shadows of the trees. For a long moment, Lydia can only stare blankly at the cobbled streets ahead of them, cannot help but think that the last time she was here, it had been with Allison. That Allison had still been –  
  
Lydia swallows through the uprising of acridity in her throat, bites down on her tongue until her head clears enough to understand that Scott is speaking to her.  
  
“Would you like to come with us?” he is saying. “I’m sure you are a more frequent patron of the shops than – ”  
  
A sudden shriek of laughter; two children appear from between a row of houses, the pale, oblong shape of a pig’s bladder bouncing between them, and Lydia shrinks back into the underbrush. She feels the scribe watching as she does, a dull prickling on her skin that only serves to raise her ire.  
  
Who is he, she thinks savagely, even as the scar across her hip blisters, that he should consider himself worthy of exacting judgment?  
  
She turns sharply, then, and begins walking back. The boy-king lets out a small, cut-off protest, one that is soon swallowed by foliage and distance. This time, they do not follow her.  
  
There is a part of her that viciously hopes they do not remember their way back; that, even if they do, they will choose not to return. She hopes that the matron in the apothecary will stick her unwanted nose into their business, will pepper them with cups of hot tea and questions and regale them with warnings about what lives beyond the outskirts of the village. Lydia hopes they will believe her.  
  
Back in the house, Lydia is halfway through a rereading of _Sphaerics_ when she realizes that she had not bothered to reconstruct the barrier. You see, for every hope there is always another that is equally contending – one much more irrational and dangerous.

 

* * *

  
  
They come back, arms and backs full of goods and perishables, and do not mention anything about long-nosed apothecaries or testimonies. Instead, the scribe disappears into the pasture with a few of the parcels and the remaining boy smiles at Lydia, gestures toward the ones that have been dumped onto the kitchen table.  
  
“Spring is carrot season,” he says, sounding for all the world like a schoolboy eager to please with his newfound knowledge. “And we’ve also a sack of oats somewhere here – one of the last, according to the gentleman.” Lydia briefly considers telling him Master Finstock – the only farmer in the village known to sell his oats – delivers this spiel to every naïve newblood passing through. Seeing as she cannot, she laces her hands behind her back and nods.  
  
The boy-king introduces her to a few other sacks – onions, leeks, watercress found near the river, two jars of tallow. He then rolls up his sleeves – unnecessarily, given that the cuffs of grandfather’s shirt do not reach even halfway down his forearms – and says, “I may not be skilled at the hearth but I have good reason to believe – at least according to a few tenable sources, including my mother – that I am occasionally decent at peeling vegetables.”  
  
Lydia does not allow herself to dwell on the parcels left unopened.

 

* * *

  
  
The sun is beginning to sink by the time the makeshift stew is ready. They eat at the kitchen table, all makeshift cutlery and no linens and grandmother would have surely shrieked loud enough to curdle blood had she been present. The _king_ , in her unkempt kitchen, eating potage with a wooden stirring spoon.  
  
“My lady,” said royalty begins at present, having finished his four servings in silence, “we are unduly grateful for your continued hospitality.” His mouth opens as though to continue, then closes. Lydia feels the table quivering from the force of his leg.  
  
After a long silence, he begins again. “My lady,” he says. “There – there is something you should know, regarding our – my – stay tonight. Er, well. I understand if – ”  
  
The scribe cuts him off. “What my king is saying is that there is the not-so-off-chance he will be turning into a large, homicidal beast later tonight. In approximately half an hour, if we’re to be exact.”  
  
The boy-king looks both pained and resigned. “Yes,” he agrees, somewhat acerbically. “Thank you.” When he looks at Lydia again, he is nothing but large, earnest eyes and anxious tone, “I assure you that we have taken measures to ensure the safety of both you and the villagers. But if you would like us, or even just me, to leave, it is nothing but understandable.”  
  
Not for the first time in the past day, Lydia studies the two boys sitting across from her. The king who descends from Cathmhaol of the Hales, the first wolf. Alpha of coveted eyes. Allison’s soulmate. A thousand other epithets, but who is still a boy with large, anxious eyes and a larger heart, despite –  
  
Her hands clench in her lap.  
  
She looks at the scribe who had followed his king to the village and back, despite his leg. In the dying sunlight, he is noticeably dustier than when he had last left, and Lydia knows the smudges across his face do not belong to dirt alone. Neither does the stench leaking from his pockets.  
  
They have been to the apothecary then.  
  
Oh _no_ , her heart says, even as she is standing up. She barely registers the movement.  
  
_Lydia,_ _no_. Her grandmother, stern and commanding. The one who had taught her to never let a single word slip from her - verbal or otherwise - unless necessary.  
  
In that same moment, she hears _Lydia, no_ , and it is Allison laughing, a wild, reckless thing. It makes her want to laugh back like she had before, when they had thought less of the world’s opinions.  
  
When Lydia had thought less, spoken more.  
  
And as she leaves to fetch the king a covering for the night air, she finds herself thinking wildly, maybe witches and death are not the most frightening things they’ve come across.

 

* * *

  
  
Later, Lydia will admit to all of her hairs standing on an end that first time she watches Scott transform. It is unsettling on a primal level. The smaller, doubled wolfsbane circle the scribe completed moments earlier keeps and the beast – the _king_ – skulks within, eyes glowing with every step. However, unlike the previous night, he does not throw himself at either them or the walls of his prison. He is content to pace around, stopping every so often to bare his teeth at things unseen.  
  
His scribe, she knows, will not leave him, will be content to safeguard sitting against the tree until his limbs stiffen and wounds ache, and so Lydia brings his bed to him instead – quilts and a feather pillow, as she had the previous night.  
  
When she holds the beddings out to him, she watches in astonishment as the boy cracks a small smile. Even with darkness pooling beneath his eyes, the gesture makes him look oddly younger. “I can’t sleep, but you should.”  
  
_Try,_ she urges, pressing the quilt into his arms. He takes it, faded amusement lingering in the corners of his eyes as he unfurls and drapes it over his shoulders, tucks the pillow beneath his leg for support. The stars are high and cold above them as they lean against the heavy trunk of the beech tree, waiting for morning, and she remembers the tale of how the moon rewrote her lover’s words into the night sky so that a part of him was always with her. How the scorching sun could not do the same, lest they burn so, selfishly, he inscribed them into human flesh. Selfishly, Lydia thinks, because if such was the case, then were humans nothing more than puppets to be lived vicariously through?  
  
_Selfishly,_ she thinks, because what, then, were the celestials to do when two soulmates could never meet, could never soothe the fiery words of the sun with the answer of his more frigid lover? What were they to do, when one left the other prematurely, horribly, brutally – left behind only the bite of a barren moon?  
  
Wind sifts through the leaves of the beech tree. Lydia sits underneath the change, near the roots, watches the king pace within the confines of his prison, feels the boy beside her tuck his quilt a little tighter around him, and rages at the heavens encircling bright and lofty above them all.

 

* * *

  
  
_Your highness –  
  
From the description you’ve provided, I would agree that it is a curse you are dealing with. The Dread Doctors have bestowed many such “gifts” upon favored ones in the past, although they have primarily operated using invasive surgical procedures. It is possible the fumes you’ve described operate in a similar manner by targeting any open wounds, although I would doubt the potency of the created effect. I cannot say for certain until I am able to examine you myself.  
  
As for why you awoke human, the most apparent reason I can think of lies in the Doctors’ nocturnal tendencies. This is especially relevant if we consider the possibility that, mentioned above, effectiveness of the curse has decreased with an aerosol as opposed to tactual method of transmission. With darkness comes the moon, and with the moon comes the pulling of both tides and currents.  
  
I’m sure you can do the math here. The Doctors aren’t gods, but neither do they remain fully mortal. And until they find a way to overcome this particular hurtle, they will be using it to their advantage. This would also explain why we weren’t able to locate the beast within Mason, prior to his abduction.  
  
As for immediate solutions, I can offer none, Your Highness. Neither for the doctors nor your curse. There are, however, a few long-term possibilities I’d like to suggest…_

 

* * *

  
  
One day bleeds into two, into more. Each day Lydia tackles a room, scrubs and scours and airs until her knees are scraped and her hands swollen with lye. It gives her a sense of purpose, to see how the wooden walls glisten again, almost like they had once before; now, to drag Scott and his belongings into one room and the scribe into another, as though this is permanent. The two boys are kindhearted enough to offer their help on multiple occasions, but Lydia does not let them; does not let them see the tears dripping from the end of her nose as she discovers another one of Allison’s pins in a drawer, the way she will sometimes linger at the well – allow herself to lean her face into her hands and lose to despair, wild and imminent.  
  
Each day, her scar burns more.  
  
She has heard the stories, of infections from unclaimed words, how a limb would have to be amputated only for the words to grow back on another part of their body and the infection to worsen. She has also heard of claimed words, treasured and too-soon lost, how they fester black – poisoned by a dying, inconsolable heart and, in turn, tainting what remains of the body. Lydia wonders which she would rather die from.  
  
By the fourth night she has grown sloppy. She falls asleep in the drawing room chair and awakens screaming, the sound echoing horribly off the high, papered walls and sloping ceilings. Her hip burns where his words are, as does the voice saying _if only you weren’t_ –  
  
Sometimes, afterward, she cannot differentiate dream from reality. The world spins mocking and disbelieving around her, taunting in all its alms and possibilities, and so when she feels warm hands touching her face, her shoulders, a voice telling her, “Martin? Hey, shh. It’s all right. Look at me. Martin,” she almost breaks. Almost curves into his hand, almost uses her words to say, _it’s not all right – it will never be all right_ and _thank god, thank g_ _od_ _, please don’t leave me_.  
  
Instead, she bites down on her lip hard enough to break skin.  
  
When she opens her eyes, she has been propped up against the side of the longchair, the scribe kneeling in front of her so that they are at eye level. As she watches, his eyes do not stay still; they scan every indent of her face.  
  
“Are you okay?” he asks.  
  
Slowly, she nods, releases her bottom lip and tastes the warm, sticky iron.  
  
The boy eyes her contemplatively. Then he rocks back on his heels to stand, pronounces, “It’s not good to be telling falsehoods” – a proclamation that has her staring indignantly up at him, her heart pounding at his choice of words. But he doesn’t duck his head as his friend would. Of the two, he has always been the bolder half, the less forgiving, less repentant moiety – even when he had only been a sketch in Allison’s letters.  
  
Instead, he looks briefly over her head and then back to her, tilts his own, says, “Why don’t you come with me.”  
  
So Lydia follows him into the kitchen, where a small kettle has been hung over the hearth. An opened letter rests atop the table, close enough that, as Lydia sits down, she can catch glimpses of entire sentences. Stiles must have been sitting on this stool when he had heard her.  
  
_Your highness_ – written by a firm, sloping hand,  
  
_As for immediate solutions, I can offer none for either…  
_  
Lydia looks away, down at her hands. Letters are a private matter and she thinks of her own stack in the cellar, all thirty-one of them written in the same, flourishing penmanship. She is ripped from these thoughts by a loud clattering and glances up, startled. The scribe has dropped a lid, presumably on his foot by the way he is massaging it.  
  
“ _Ow – ”_ a statement that is followed by a litany of curses and this is something Lydia would have laughed at before, to hear an aristocrat engage in such vulgarities. As it is now, she can only consider how it is that the general air of not only this royal servant, but also his king, can be so curiously unwashed. Her eyes lower, catch on a paragraph, and then she is reading without trying –  
  
_Another potential solution would be to solicit the help of a death oracle. Their cries often create a missing fundamental that match the paradoctors’ reported frequency of operation. As such, the sound may paralyze them long enough to fully incapacitate them. The caveat with this strategy, however, is that there are few oracles left and those who are have gone into hiding. History has not been kind to them, if you recall. There would also the problem of getting them to agree to such an endeavor. I seem to recall an oracle living in your southern village of Martin, but whether she still resides there cannot be said…_ _  
_  
Something cold and foreign spreads through Lydia.  
  
For a moment she is staring at the words and then she is pushing herself up from her stool, away from the table, away from the letter and all the implications it holds. The stool falls with a distant clatter behind her.  
  
The scribe, Stiles, his back hunched over the hearth, turns to her, expression startled. He is nothing if not clever, and even before she can consider how she must look to him in this moment – her hair in ten different directions, the vulnerability lined in the wrinkles of her dress and the largeness of her eyes – something passes over his face. It takes her a moment to recognize it: regret.  
  
Oh, she thinks. No.  
  
No, no, no.  
  
“It’s from Deaton,” he says, as if it clears everything.  
  
He is a fool – _she_ is a fool – and it doesn’t. Lydia turns to escape out the backdoor, overwhelmed by the need to be somewhere, _anywhere_ that is not closing in on her like the walls of this room, the contents of that letter, and bumps into a _very solid_ presence.  
  
“Mistress Martin,” Allison’s soulmate says, a smile lighting his face. “Good afternoon – ”  
  
Her only reply is to drag air noisily into her lungs. The king’s smile slips a little and he glances over her head at his friend. “Um,” he says. A moment later, understanding shifts in his eyes.  
  
“ _Oh_.”  
  
Lydia almost laughs. Instead, she runs.

 

* * *

  
  
_Master Stiles –  
  
There may be a plethora of answers to your question. As you’ve mentioned, vows of silence are not uncommon, especially for those in clerical positions. The Sisterhood of Endless Moon is one such example, although practicing members are required to cover the lower half of their faces with a ceremonial scarf. From what I can glean of her description, I do not believe that she is an indoctrinated member. There has also been documented instances of young children and adults being unable to speak in certain, highly taxing situations – often social ones. This would certainly explain her lack of speech in your presences, along with her literacy. If this is the case, it could also explain why she may be loath to hold a conversation, even with written words.  
  
Of course, there is always the supernatural to turn to, when all other explanations fail.  
  
The key is to be sensitive, Stiles. You are an ambitious boy, but ambition in the absence of consideration will only lead to callousness. She has been kind enough to receive you and Scott into her home, despite the circumstances. This, surely, is telling of her personality above all else. Be kind and be receptive, as she has with you. In time, if she is willing, your savior will open up. It is a process that cannot be pushed, as much as I know you are tempted to.  
  
Your loyal servant,  
Deaton_

 

* * *

* * *

 

Martin pushes past Scott in a surprising feat of strength, the force causing the werewolf to stumble against the doorframe. But Scott catches Stiles’ eye and Stiles knows his friend wouldn’t have been budged – scorned woman be damned – unless he consciously allowed it. A long sigh escapes Stiles.  
  
Scott sounds equally tired. “ _How_ did you break the news to her?”  
  
“I didn’t,” Stiles says, and that there is the problem. Scott’s look tells him as much.  
  
The problem, as Stiles alone knows, runs much deeper than that. It lies in acknowledging that he had never meant to deceive strange, ornery Martin. It is almost amusing, to think that the same Stiles who had been infamous in court for manipulating elders and peers alike would be – in Deaton’s words – _practicing consideration._ But there he had been, sitting at the kitchen table, contemplating the gentlest way to approach the girl, when her terror cut sharply through the walls. How he had moved from his stool to her side, he will never fully recall.  
  
And more so is this: that he has not tried to purposefully deceive anyone other than himself, because the _true_ problem is not that he had meant to deceive Martin, but that he had meant to let her go. There had been something small and breakable about her sleeping on the settee, sitting at the kitchen table. It had made Stiles wonder, despite _and_ in light of Deaton’s letters, why she would choose to confine herself to this crumbling manor, surviving on the most awful biscuits and never speaking a word.  
  
_Think of Meredith,_ his mind whispered then. _Think of what happened to Meredith,_ and something had twisted inside his chest. In that moment, he had had the strangest, most morbidly fascinating thought. He had thought that if he saw Martin lying on that bed like he had seen Meredith, there would not be a single part within him that would survive.  
  
As it is now, Stiles rubs at his eyes and exhales, long and slow – once more, for good measure. Then he is pushing past Scott and out into the sunlight.

 

* * *

  
  
Their paths converge near the beech tree. Martin stands with her back to him and he cannot see her, but somehow Stiles knows that her fingers are fisted into the skirt of her dress, a gesture she is wont to do when upset. Stiles wonders if she realizes. He reaches out and touches her elbow.  
  
Above them, Allison’s falcon shrieks its outrage. Then the girl is whirling around to face him and – _my god_ , he thinks. A perverse part of him had found her beautiful that first night under the stars, her face brimming with ire and her arms full of quilts. Martin furious in sunlight, however, cannot be compared to. She is near impossible to look at without forgetting how to breathe.  
  
The falcon shrieks again, and Stiles drops his hand. She twists her body away from reach and half a breath leaves his chest.  
  
“Martin,” he hears himself say.  
  
“Martin, just – please. Listen.” Her stare is nothing short of condemning, but he takes it to be a good sign when she does not retreat any further.  
  
He collects a deep breath and releases it. In this moment, Martin is as skittish as Roscoe ever was before he grew older and content to peruse the grass under nine-out-of-ten situations, and so Stiles says as gently as he knows how, “Scott should be here. It is his story, too.”

 

* * *

* * *

  
  
In the time it takes for the boys to explain all they know, the kettle has long burned dry, forgotten until Stiles leaps up with a yelp and the banging of his knee against the table.  
  
They tell her about the Dread Doctors, a preternatural triumvirate purported to having discovered the secret to life, whose primary interests lie in resurrecting the beast of Gevaudan. That is, the historical beast that felled over thirty villages, whose legacy the family Argent – _Allison_ – burned two centuries past.  
  
They tell her about the Doctors’ creations, blessed by neither the sun nor moon but by scalpels and fervid minds; who can easily cross mountain ash barriers and resist wolfsbane. About the chimera called Theo, who stole his sister’s heart to become the vessel but still fell short. And of another kinder, unsuspecting boy who had been chosen instead.  
  
They tell her about the curse that has befallen them, how they were infected and scattered like ripe thistledown. She learns of the theories Deaton has written them regarding their nightly transformations and the moon that pulls both ocean and ley tides, learns about Scott’s beast, Stiles’ night terrors, and the three still lost.  
   
She learns how they – “are doomed,” Stiles suggests –  
  
No, not that.  
  
See, Lydia cannot speak, but she can read between the lines. She learns that they are as kind and stubborn as Allison portrayed them to be – as Allison was, herself. She comes to see why Allison would have found her niche in them, how she would have died for them.  
  
It is hubris, then, that strikes down the great heroes. And Lydia of Martin is no hero, but she cannot deny the convergence of truths and so this will be how she falls: the growing realization that not only will the death of her beloved pass through her, but also the death of those around him. That her grandmother taught her to wrap herself in solitude and silence, but Allison had come bursting through her cracks like sunlight. That this youngest Argent continues to do so even now, having led Stiles to her the first night and Scott, the second.  
  
It is also hubris, then, that strikes down all mortals, lionhearted or no. For Lydia of Martin is no hero and this will be how she falls: the growing sentiment that it is not Allison who is now whispering into her ear, but her own heartbeat – understanding with a damning clarity that no matter her path, Lydia always seems to find herself helping the two boys sitting across from her. Then, unwittingly at first, through oils and extracts initially intended for Allison. Now, with her pulse echoing in her ears, whispering not that she _must_ help the two boys sitting across from her, but that, all the more impossibly, she _can_.  
  
(Lydia will tell herself this in the late of night, when she paces and panics and regrets: break the curse, then you will be free to leave.)

 

* * *

 

 **III. Kullat  
** _You carried prisms in your arms_  
_The waves lapping your bared feet_  
_And as you turned your countenance toward me_  
_I had found myself hoping_  
_That you would never look away_

 

* * *

 

  
  
Scott and Stiles no longer hide in the drawing room, hunched over that small writing desk. Lydia no longer locks the cellar door behind her. They all agree that Stiles is no longer allowed to be in charge of tea.

 

* * *

  
  
It is on the seventh day that their circumstances change. In hindsight, as Scott will mention later, it is surprising they even lasted this long.  
  
It begins with an interception. A crow arrives from Deaton with a scroll tied to one leg and more than a few feathers missing. Lydia is the one to retrieve it from the open kitchen window and her hand comes away, sticky with its blood.  
  
So are the contents of the letter. A few words are highlighted in dried brown: spear, oracle, others, doctors.  
  
At the bottom, the words _‘I look forward to catching up’_ are scrawled in –  
  
“Is that – blood? Did he write that with blood?” In the background, Stiles rages alone over this detail.  
  
_Who is ‘he’?_ Lydia wants to ask, but the answer is gleaned easily enough from the agitation in Stiles’ movements, the stillness of Scott’s. ‘He,’ and not ‘them.’ _Theo._  
  
“He must have intercepted the crow somewhere along the way,” Scott says at length, pushing away from the table. “We have to leave. _Now._ ”  
  
“Including you,” Stiles tells Lydia half-apologetically, and Scott fills in the other half with genuine distress, says, “I’m sorry, Martin,” having finally dropped the ‘Mistress’ two days ago. “We’ve you in danger. Theo – well. He’s relentless with everyone we touch.”  
  
Lydia gives a sharp shake of her head in reply, would like to have mentioned how she would never have been in danger if she hadn’t allowed it to be so. Instead, she briefly touches the back of the king’s hand before going to collect what is left of her belongings: her clothes and lightest sheets, her grandmother’s cane, and thirty-one letters carefully bundled.  
  
When the last of them steps beyond the outer fence, Lydia stops to carefully repack the barrier and smooth the dirt until no visible tracks are left. Sensibly, there is no reason to do so anymore – nothing is left within the boundaries now, that requires shielding from an older, wilder magic. But the manor stands in the distance, small and solitary among the grasslands, its stone walls having protected Lydia for thirteen years –  shouldn’t she in her last moments offer the same in return, no matter how paltry the gesture?  
  
A gesture that, she cannot help but think, her heart clenching, is a burial.

 

* * *

  
They set a brisk pace, heading north – Stiles and Lydia on the horse and Scott loping easily in front of them on two feet. Yannic, the boys have returned to Deaton along with a brief letter detailing the predicament at hand, and Scott says, “We have to gain enough distance by nightfall – at least enough to ensure us for the night. I’m not sure we can travel much with me incapacitated.”  
  
But the twenty miles they travel, slowing every so often to cover their tracks, is not enough, and he reaches them come the first two hours of morning. It is Scott’s snarl later that night that rips Lydia from a series of increasingly fitful dreams, and even as she shifts to her side, ponders the canopies hanging above them and the bleariness of the flickering fire, the disquiet still does not leave the back of her tongue.  
  
Stiles’ eyes flicker toward her as she slowly rouses into a sitting position, and his eyes and the seemingly careless hand on a sword tell her what she already knows – their visitor has come. Carefully, without moving her head, Lydia sweeps her gaze over the campsite: the fire now banked, Scott with his ears twitching and muzzle peeled back, Roscoe strangely nowhere in sight –  
  
“Now here’s one you haven’t introduced me to yet.” The voice flows, startling and ordinary in every way, from around them.  
  
Lydia thinks she might hear Stiles mutter, “Here we fucking go” under his breath, but then a figure is melting out from the darkness of the surrounding trees and Stiles is pushing to his feet. Lydia has no choice but to follow suit, the quilt slipping off from her.  
  
The newcomer comes, his smile dripping like oil, and there is something obsequious about how carefully pressed his shirt is, how there is not a single strand of hair out of line, as if he is some noble paying a visit to some crumbling and long forgotten village of his. His eyes glisten in the firelight as he considers the picture before him and all its components. In the background, Scott releases a low snarl.  
  
Something in the stranger’s eyes sharpen upon hearing it. He turns to Stiles, saying with a smiling visage, “I happened to be in the vicinity when I caught sight of your messenger. I thought I would invite myself over for a visit, seeing as it has been too long since we’ve all last met.”  
  
“It’s impolite to presume your presence was wanted,” Stiles says. “And, frankly, I could live the rest of my life without having to see your face again, so feel free to invite yourself off a cliff.”  
  
The other boy laughs. “As droll as ever. Isn’t he?” he asks, shifting his gaze onto Lydia. “I don’t believe we’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. My name is Theo. And yours, little faun?”  
  
Stiles shifts then, so that he is drawing Lydia behind him with one hand, his other gripping the handle of his sword. “Go,” he says, and all pretense has dropped from his voice. Lydia has heard Stiles at varying points along the choleric spectrum: enraged, irritated, acerbic; but now, underneath it all, lies something colder and less forgiving. In this moment, Lydia wonders what he is truly capable of.  
  
Three things happen then, in hasty succession. One, metallic slide of a blade meeting open air. Two, the surging, petrifying rush of death approaching. Three, the feeling of being thrown through the air, Lydia’s stomach plummeting, her mind curiously barren.  
  
Lydia hits her head so hard she sees the heavens blooming across her vision and for a long moment she lies there, unable to recollect which way is up or down, only knows that she has to – _has_ to, _now_ – find her feet again. By the time she does so, tottering slightly, her eyes have focused enough to see Stiles being held up by the front of his neck, his sword protruding through the backside of Theo. Blood drips languorously off from the tip.  
  
Theo clenches Stiles tighter, watching as the boy’s face grows steadily florid. He says, “For all that talk, you should remember that you are but a mere human among higher orders.”  
  
Stiles’ only reply – given his usual method being physically blocked – is to twist the sword further into Theo’s flesh. The chimera’s eyes widen briefly before he laughs, and his voice can only be described as indulgent when he says, “Another human mistake: thinking this _gift_ could ever possibly hurt me,” and then he is tossing Stiles head-first against a nearby trunk, sword clattering to the ground. In that same instant, Lydia’s heart clenches near impossibly in her throat, squeezes out a sharp, indignant scream, and it is enough to make the chimera pause and glance her way. If anything, however, her reaction only serves to amuse him further – perhaps causes him to write her off as some tepid provincial girl – and he turns his attention away from her, onto the only other soul left standing.  
  
Scott, who has not ceased in his noises since the chimera’s arrival and who is now tugging fruitlessly on his chains, strains toward Theo with teeth bared. Theo walks closer to the circle of mountain ash as if purveying a rumored goldmine.  
  
Lydia runs over to Stiles who lies on the ground, groaning. Her hands flutter anxiously over the warm blood trickling down the side of his head, where he clutches loosely at his side, wound barely healed. His lids flutter helplessly, only the whites of his eyes peeking through, and suddenly Lydia is rising to her feet and turning to the other boy – suddenly finds she does not _care_ that he is a chimera, does not care that he is most likely infinitely stronger than her. She thinks she can eradicate him for even daring to harm the most important person in this forsaken world.  
  
What she does not expect, however, is this: Theo already striding toward her, his hand fisting into her hair and dragging her toward Scott in his makeshift prison.  
  
“Look how the mighty have fallen,” she hears Theo say, before her face is being thrusted close enough that she can feel the hot waves of Scott’s panting, the flecks that foam from his jaws. “Can you see?” and Theo’s breath is even hotter next to her ear. “Tell me, how does it feel to serve such a barbaric king?”  
  
Lydia feels hair tearing from her skull as she struggles to free herself, and her fingernails come away damp with the chimera’s skin and blood. Theo only presses her closer until she feels the stickiness of where Stiles wounded him against her backside, only says dolefully, “Also loyal to the end, are you?  I suppose you cannot wait to join the rest of your mutt brethren. So be it, then, my lady.”  
  
And then he is throwing her past the ash barrier, into the den of the wolves, straight into Scott’s yawning jaws. Lydia does not even have time to consider screaming – only sees herself looming closer to those sharp, glistening canines, remembers out of all things how Allison had once described her soulmate as possessing the strongest teeth in the kingdom.  
  
Scott’s paw catches her unaware from the side, knocks her so that she is tumbling out from the circle. Only when she looks up again does she understand her role as that of a distractor, because from where he was once hidden behind her, Theo is now leaping toward Scott with his claws unsheathed – a mountain cat to the king’s wolf.  
  
“Goodbye, old friend,” she hears Theo say then, and suddenly the events of the night all seem to converge into a single tipping point. Lydia is left with only terror and rage: a single breath that wells up, cloying and ruthless and _knowing_ deep in her lungs, and then she is screaming silently at Theo, thinking,  
  
No, _no_ – I _won’t allow it_ –  
  
Lydia does not remember the thought translating into audible sound but the aftermath is there – copper and gravel in her mouth, dripping wet from the chimera’s ears as he lands a few feet away. Slowly, he lurches back onto his feet and, for a brief moment, Lydia feels vindication at the sight of his now rumpled hair.  
  
“Martin!” she hears Stiles shout, hears Scott’s baying, and for a terrified moment she wonders if she has also managed to hurt them. But then a near beatific smile is widening Theo’s face and Lydia, her lungs still whistling, realizes her mistake. Realizes how she has fallen headlong into his trap.  
  
Theo steps toward her in a lupine, slick manner of grace. The smile does not leave his face as he studies her and says, voice low, “Oh, but you’re a _vixen,_ aren’t you.” His fingers brush the hollow of her throat and she feels the scraping of a fingernail. “A thing of beauty. Now I see why they bother keeping you around. Not perfect, not yet, but you _will_ be.”  
  
And then Stiles is between them, his arm pressing warm against Lydia, his words are muted and no less threatening against the backdrop of Scott’s snarls. “Touch her again. _Think_ of her again, Theo.”  
  
Theo declines politely. “I have my soulmate already, as we all know. All I want from this one are those riveting screams. You are free to salvage the rest,” and Lydia cannot ever recall seeing the subsequent stillness that falls over the boy standing between her and a chimera.  
  
As she watches, something novel curls itself into the corner of Stiles’ mouth. Quiet and dark. _Eager._ And when he says, “I could murder you ten times over, and somehow I still doubt it would be satisfying enough,” Lydia knows his words are not some exaggeration meant only to intimidate.  
  
Yet the chimera only laughs and says, “Ah, yes. _There_ you are. I want to see the nogitsune, Stiles. I want to see that void inside of you. We both know it has never truly faded away.”  
  
Lydia grits her teeth at this blatant provocation; watches as the underside of Stiles’ jaw does the same. In this moment, something uglier rises between the two boys, a dark, necrotic festering that has been left exposed to air. This, Lydia knows now, is exactly the climate Theo is encouraging – _has_ been encouraging since he first emerged from the trees, and so she reaches out.  
  
Lydia tugs at the roughness of Stiles’ sleeve until he breaks away from his trance, until he is glancing down at her, the movement too sharp to be cursory. For a long moment, his eyes stare at her like he has Theo: unseeing and near black. Then, slowly, the strain begins to bleed from his jawline, tightness fading from the corners of his eyes.  
  
“You all right?” he asks then, and his eyes glance her over in the same way the back of his finger brushes absently over her cheek: gentle and brief and all-consuming in equal parts. He then shifts his attention back onto Theo, leaving a tidal bore in his wake – one that has Lydia standing motionless, even as she sees the waves bearing down over her. This, she thinks, is more terrifying than any chimera rushing towards her with the promise of death imminent. This itself is death imminent – the feeling of her heart surging up into his touch, the world wheeling violently beneath her, his words burning into her skin as painful as the first time. This, itself, knowing that he is a storm and she is the aftermath;one touch and she is undone.  
  
A small smile hovers on Theo’s lips as he watches them. “If it is of any comfort, you and your rose-haired faun will remain together in the new world that is to come. Just, unfortunately, not our oldest friend.”  
  
Stiles says sympathetically, “You’ve miscalculated the appeal of both yourself and your new world.”  
  
Theo only laughs. “It _is_ fortuitous that you’ll be around to amuse me. But the night is getting late, and I only wanted to make a brief call to ask after my pack.” He glances at Scott. “Or what will soon be my pack, from the looks of things. The hourglass is running empty, best friend.”  
  
“As for now,” Theo says, “one last gesture of goodwill before I retire for the night.”  
  
Stiles must see what Lydia cannot, because suddenly the muscles across his back are tensing. Then he is lurching toward Theo, barking, “ _Don’t – ”_  
  
His hand grasps empty air. Theo is nowhere to be seen, and only then does Lydia begin to realize how easily Theo could have killed them if he so desired. Stiles whirls around, fists clenched, eyes darkened in panic as he stares past Lydia – and then she is turning too, but not before the thick braid of mountain ash, wolfsbane, and nettle surrounding Scott erupts.  
  
Tiny remnants of the once-barrier drift down like rain, coating their hair, clothes, and lashes. In the midst of it all, Theo spreads his arms, says, “There. That feels much better, now doesn’t it, Scott?”  
  
Scott, freed, replies by lunging for his throat. The chimera flips effortlessly onto a branch high above them, his teeth flashing in the darkness of night. From below, Scott slams himself into the trunk, hard enough to send the tree shuddering ominously, and Stiles reaches for Lydia’s hand, pulls them both behind another tree further away.  
  
“I take it I’m not in welcome company any longer—” Theo begins.  
  
“How surprised do you think he’ll be to realize he never was,” Stiles mutters.  
  
“—But I hope you find this small parting gift satisfactory until we meet again.”  
  
These last words are directed at Stiles and Lydia with gleaming eyes and a courteous bow, and then he is advancing through the trees, Scott crashing after him from below. The silence that is left behind is near deafening, and it is only in this aftermath that terror has time to blot through Lydia like an inkwell overturned, diffusing in cold, uneven patches across her skin.  
  
When she summons enough momentum to turn herself around, Stiles is already back in the clearing, dousing the fire. “We have to follow Scott,” he says, hands steady where his voice is not, “before he does something he’ll never forgive himself for. We can collect the rest later.”  
  
He inserts two fingers into his mouth, whistles sharply, and the sound streaks through Lydia’s frayed nerves to such a degree that all her hairs seem to stand on end. From the distance, Lydia hears a distant whinnying and the crashing of a moving mass against foliage and wood. Then Roscoe is breaking through into the clearing, foam flecking his sides, upper lip curled as if sensing the dangers that had been present only a few minutes prior. He canters over to Stiles, ears flicking and hooves just as skittish. Stiles strokes the horse’s neck a few times, tells him, “Hey, hey. I won’t let anything happen to you. It’s all right, you big baby,” before heaving the saddle over his back and securing it.  
  
Only then does he meet Lydia’s stare, says wryly, “You didn’t think I’d subject him to Theo’s influence, did you?”

 

* * *

  
  
They follow Scott’s tracks until a small glen offers them a glimpse of a black, hulking mass on the far end, disappearing into the borderline of dark trees. They are halfway across the clearing when a horrifying and distinctly female scream cuts through the trees, stopping them in their tracks. The hairs on Lydia’s neck stand on end. Beside her, Stiles’ face bleeds ashen in the moonlight, his hand loosened from Roscoe’s reins.  
  
The scream rings out again, louder this time, and Lydia is leaping off the horse, running with Stiles behind her, pleading – at who, she doesn’t know – at Scott, at the girl, at the heavens – but pleading all the same, _oh, please, please, don’t,_ her heart crashing into her ribcage and her body crashing into the woods. The trees crowd around them in dark pillars and Lydia nearly stumbles face-first into several trunks, feels as splinters snag into her palms and fingers. But then, again, another scream – this time, followed by a cracking sound and a muted snarl.  
  
“This way,” Stiles pants, warm against her as his fingers find hers, pulling her along through the underbrush, and she clutches at him anxiously. He clutches back, palms sweating. All the while, the screams grow higher, closer, more desperate.  
  
“Oh god, oh god,” Stiles is chanting under his breath, and Lydia thinks she should pull away before she loses what is left in her stomach, and then they are breaking through into a small grove. Lydia squeezes her eyes shut for half a moment before she forces herself to wrench them open and _look_.  
  
The hulking, monstrous shape that is Scott bears down on a smaller, suspiciously limp figure – a _child?_ – and Lydia feels her knees weakening in horror. But then the victim is stirring beneath Scott’s giant talons and Lydia is staring intently enough to notice that it has too much hair to be human and then, weakly, a _tail_ thrashes –  
  
The vulpine screams the same, horrifying noise they had followed, and in the same instant, a thin, crackling arc of lightning discharges from its fur. But Scott doesn’t seem to mind. He only grumbles and resettles himself so that his muzzle rests on its back, his glowing eyes fixated on Stiles and Lydia who continue to only stand, frozen.  
  
Then Stiles’ breath is catching audibly in his throat. He takes a step forward. “ _Kira?_ ”

 

* * *

 

 **IV. Hamal  
** _The days grow longer_  
_Warmth trailing in your wake, trees blooming beneath your hands_  
_From afar, I burn with longing_  
_To be touched just as gently_  
_To flower beneath your embrace_

 

* * *

 

 

Kira as a fox is beautiful, all snow-laden fields with a smattering of darker points. Kira as a person snoring softly in gentle, morning light is even more so. Her hair spills over the smooth expanse of her back and onto the grass in thick, dark whirls like Allison’s used to do when she and Lydia lay in her grandmother’s pasture, watching the clouds pass above them.  
  
“Whshappn’g?” are her first words, cheek pressed into the dirt. Then she is sitting up ramrod straight, nearly clipping Scott under the chin.  
  
“What – what happened – what’s happening?” she gasps, then louder still when she glances down. Lydia is swift to approach her, to wrap her in a shawl and hand her a change of clothing. The look the girl gives her is lost, a ship blown offshore, and somehow Lydia feels a small, reassuring smile forming in reply.  
   
The hem is too short but the dress suits Kira nicely, its motif matching the dark of her eyes. By the time she returns, Scott has also finished dressing and they are slowly gathering their bearings.  
  
“Kira,” Scott says, and smiles. There is a profound relief that marks the corners of his eyes, only to fade moments later. “We haven’t enough horses.”  
  
Kira smiles back, shy and steady. Despite the evident confusion that had coursed through her only moments before, her only words are, “I’ll manage, I suppose.”  
  
The glance Stiles sends Lydia is as dry as the southernmost deserts, as if they alone are witness to some common, exasperating grievance. “Clearly they aren’t in need of any high horses,” he tells her, and she nearly laughs out loud.

 

* * *

  
  
They travel upstream until they reach a small grove far enough from the village and close enough should they need supplies. Scott, when pressed, recalls brief flashes of the previous night – the constant chafing of the wolfsbane, Theo’s face and scent, racing in search of something. For the most part, however, he shakes his head.  
  
“It is difficult to recall wolf memories through human means,” he says.  
  
Kira is none the better. She confesses, “I don’t think I was in this form before today,” and if that isn’t a new development then Stiles doesn’t know what is.  
  
A heavy, dull ache is spreading through his head, a reminder that he has not slept in nearly a day. As Scott proceeds to elucidate Kira on the past week, Stiles leans forward to rub the knot forming between his brows. When he opens his eyes, Martin is staring at him, frowning.  
  
“Don’t look at me like that,” he tells her.  
  
She points to the bedding spread neatly out underneath the tree.  
  
“I’m not tired,” he insists. Five minutes later, he is snoring, his head somehow having made its way onto her shoulder.

 

* * *

  
  
Stiles regains awareness when a soft, cool weight tucks itself under his chin. An instinctive sound escapes his throat and he feels the hair being smoothed back from his forehead, a warm pressure resting against his scalp.  When he opens his eyes, it is only to be caught in a sea so green he is content to do nothing but drown.  
  
He is sure he has lived this moment before.  
  
The sea blinks and – oh – they are replaced by eyes no less green. Martin, he thinks belatedly. It is Martin who has returned ashore, her eyes wet with the sea and her hair collecting shards of sunset. Martin who is turning away, and something twists violently inside his chest.  
  
“Don’t go,” he hears himself saying. Sleep has loosened his tongue, creates a taste in his mouth as inebriating as Deaton’s moonshine. _Wait._ “Please.”  
  
_Stay._  
  
She is looking down at him again with those eyes the color of all things _right_ – of the rare green scattered like precious stones among the red in his book, and he reaches up, longing, thinks that if he just touches her, if just this _once_ , he will be satisfied with this world.  
  
“Please.”

 

* * *

  
  
Stiles feels sweat collecting in the hollow of his throat, under the curves of his knees and arms. He slowly opens his eyes and his breath catches in his throat.  
  
There is a certain feralty to the girl lying across from him, even in sleep. He’d thought the creases of her brows would smooth out, that perpetual frown would have untucked itself from the corners of her mouth. He’d _thought_ about her sleeping, mercy. Stiles uses this newfound horror to roll himself away, forces himself to ignore the sticky uncoupling of sun-warmed skin that had been his arm over hers, his knee pressed against the back of hers.  
  
He struggles upright and, for a moment, sits, looking up. The sparse canopy of leaves rustles with the wind, dappled sunlight swaying gently across the ground and Stiles glances backwards, makes sure Martin is not tangled uncomfortably in her sheets before climbing to his feet, stretching.  
  
Roscoe grazes nearby but there is no sign of either Scott or Kira, and Stiles pauses for a moment to pat his faithful companion’s neck, whisper, “Watch over Martin for me,” before heading towards the nearby stream to wash up. Sweat trickles down the side of his neck and he grimaces. As he nears the stream, however, he hears a familiar set of voices.  
  
Scott and Kira look up from near the streambed, a modest blanket of food spread between them, Kira’s hair having been swept up into a ponytail. Stiles had heard her voice talking earnestly long before he had reached them, had wondered whether he would find her donning that instinctive habit of hers when animated. So it is the sight of her hair, pulled neatly away from her face, that nearly uproots Stiles since they had first found her the previous night, has him desperate to say, _this is real. My god, tell me there is still hope._  
  
“Thank you for waking me up,” he settles on instead, allowing an appropriate amount of derision into his words. He stoops over the stream and allows the blessedly cool water to slash over his face, to drip down his hair and soak into the collar of his stiff shirt. He makes certain that his eyes are the only things dry when he finally faces them.  
  
“You looked tired,” Scott offers belatedly.  
  
“ _You_ look,” Stiles begins, but Kira hushes them. She motions for Stiles to sit down and, when he does, stuffs a soft bread roll into his hands. It is still slightly warm.  
  
Stiles tears into it, says with his mouth full, “You went to the village?” _Without me?_ is implied.  
  
“To be fair, we left before you and Martin er, made it to bed,” Kira says. A smile lights her face as she considers her choice in wording.  
  
“Kira, there is not one ounce of me that is not severely disappointed in you.”  
  
“There’s not one ounce of me that _is,_ and I’m the king,” Scott says. “Also, I’m heavier.”  
  
“See, this is exactly the power imbalance our gentle elders fear.”  
  
Scott grins then, wolfish in every way, and Kira laughs as bright as her namesake. Stiles buries his face in his hands and quietly savors every moment.

 

* * *

  
  
When Lydia awakens, the sky is a darkening pastiche of pink and orange and when she glances to the side, the other girl is sitting no more than a few feet away, sorting through a few linen-made sacks including, Lydia recognizes, the belongings she and Stiles had left behind the previous night while pursuing Scott. As though feeling eyes on her, the girl raises her head and peers at Lydia, exclaims, “Oh, _hello_.”  
  
Before Lydia can react, she is setting down her belongings and sidling over, all bright phoenix eyes and shy bunching of cheeks.  
  
“I’m Kira of the Yukimura massif,” she introduces as Lydia blearily rises into a sitting position. “I apologize for the belated introduction. I’ve been meaning to thank you for the clothes.”  
  
Lydia touches her throat and Kira quickly says, “Oh, no – please don’t worry. I understand. The boys told me about your not being able to speak –  uh, I mean, your condi – _no,_ I, um. Ugh, oh _no._ ” Her eyes are squeezed shut by the end and she can visibly be seen counting backwards in her head. A few moments later, she reopens her eyes and grimaces. “Sorry. My tongue tends to outrun my mind, most days. Today, especially.”  
  
Lydia inclines her head reassuringly, thinks fondly of Allison’s letters – Kira of eternal snow and apologies.  
  
“Um! Scott and I went to the village earlier, and we managed to snag some rolls from the bakery if you’re hungry. They are very good.” They _are_ very good. The roll Kira hands Lydia is soft enough to peel apart in flaky, pillowy clouds and Lydia secretly wants to cry after months of eating only hardtack and the occasional oatcake. The Snowmaiden, Lydia is learning, is not one for harboring emotions – an observation demonstrated by the elation that subsequently brims across Kira’s expression when she says, “It’s good, huh?” before shoving another roll into Lydia’s hands. And if Lydia cannot ever tell Kira in words that the second is even better than the first, then maybe one day she will at least learn how to smile back again.  
  
As they eat – they end up splitting a third roll between them – Kira chatters with a candid sort of generosity that has Lydia wondering whether the girl realizes the severity of divulging information without the king’s approval – to a _stranger,_ no less. Perhaps the Fox believes Lydia to be both fully mute and illiterate and, therefore, not a threat. But as it is, Kira informs Lydia of the theories spun while Lydia had been asleep.  
  
Kira mentions how they are now speculating Scott to be a proverbial beacon, calling his scattered pack to him while simultaneously lighting a path toward them. This could potentially explain the dead run Scott had taken once Theo had released him, the purpose he had reportedly felt while in his wolf form – and, importantly, how he had found Kira. This could also explain why Scott had subconsciously chosen to lead after leaving Lydia’s house. However, like all theories, Kira says, it needs to be consciously – “or subconsciously, in Scott’s case” – tested.  
  
Through further contrasting of Scott and Kira’s experiences, it almost seems as if the dread doctors were not as successful in cursing Scott. After all, he had been the only one besides Stiles, who was fully human, to regain both his human form and consciousness come daylight, with Kira drily suggesting his true alpha status as the reason, “as it has been with many other things.” And like a beacon, this effect seems to draw the presence of nearby pack members and, in the process, bring them under his protection.  
  
“Largely because I don’t remember being human even once, in the week between the fight and when you found me,” Kira explains. “And no one in the village remembers seeing any er, naked girls running through the woods, although” – and here her voice lowers along with her head, sheepish – “they _did_ report unusual thunderstorms all this past week.”  
  
It is at this point that Scott and Stiles return, arms full of turgid, dripping waterskins. “We filled them with water,” Scott says unnecessarily, flustered when both girls turn to look at them. Lydia bites the inside of her cheek, suddenly finds her shoes very interesting while Kira laughs outright beside her. Stiles only groans and begins stringing the skins in panniers over the sides of his horse.  
  
“Thank you for telling us,” Kira teases her king, and Scott lifts his eyes heavenward even as a faint smile lifts the corner of his mouth. He steps forward to help his friend only to, after a few minutes, glance over at Lydia. His smile softens then, into something kinder and infinitesimally more careful.  
  
“Did Kira talk your ear off?” he says fondly, and the accused Kira crosses her eyes at him, retorts, “I only told her what _you_ dictated to me, Mr. Majesty.”  
  
Stiles lets out a bark of laughter at this, says to Lydia in sympathy, “Mr. Majesty requires his confidantes to be fully updated on _all_ his impassioned theories,” with Kira looping her arm through Lydia’s, and Lydia cannot help the flush of pleasure that steadily creeps up her cheeks.

 

* * *

  
  
They needn’t use flint to light their fires anymore – not when Kira ignites their kindling with a flick of her wrist, including those dampened by the elements – although it is harder, she claims modestly. Allison had often mentioned the warrior’s affinity for fulguration, but it is different witnessing it in person. Kira flushes, says, “It’s not so impressive, really. My mother, when she was the Fox, was much more powerful – er, although she _did_ accidentally – not really accidentally – release a Voided counterpart. She had _eight_ tails and I only have the one. But I’ve been getting better at controlling it,” she finishes brightly.  
  
Scott leads their increasingly bedraggled party through the woodlands and far away from the main road. At one point, Stiles feels compelled to point out that since they are traveling parallel to the main road anyway, maybe they should take the main road. “This way,” he says, “we’ll have the benefit of finding Malia _before_ we die of internal bleeding – ” A branch whacks him in the eye. His request goes unheeded. “ – or no, maybe that’s just an unimportant human problem.” In any case, Lydia notices halfway through their trek that even though Stiles insists either Scott or Kira to spearhead – especially when they find themselves lost in thicker foliage – it is this very human scribe who does the same for Lydia, is somehow always one step ahead of her, and a small part of Lydia finds herself increasingly touched with every passing hour. Mostly, she is too busy battling the last of the summer mosquitoes to even _think_.  
  
Finally, Scott stops, for a moment looking as confused as the rest of them. “Malia,” he begins, and Kira asks, “Where?” in the same breath Stiles rests his hands on his knees, says, “Here?” But Scott does not reply – does not even seem to hear them – as he takes the last few strides that break them out of the forest and onto the edge of a mountainous, sloping hillside. Stopping mere inches away from the incline, the king’s eyes fix downward.  
  
Below them, across the steppe, sprawls a settlement surrounded by concrete walls and much too large to be a town. Lydia’s breath catches in her throat.  
  
“Oh, look,” Stiles finds the energy to say. He sprawls forward onto the grass, voice muffled. “Civilization.”  
  
“Oh, _look,_ ” Kira echoes, much more enthusiastically. “Reyes!”  
  
Stiles squints up at her. “As in, Erica of Reyes, Reyes? How would you know?”  
  
“The golden weathervane.” Kira points to a distant speck winking in sunlight. Scott does not even need to squint, says, “So it is. Somehow, it’s hard to believe that this intricate a piece could already be crafted close to ten millennia ago.”  
  
As Kira and Scott discuss the comparative merits of an artifact privy only to their eyes, Stiles turns to Lydia, suggests, “Enjoy this feeling of relatively mild human incompetence. It will only grow worse once we locate Malia and Liam.”  
  
Lydia shakes her head, peers down at pages of her history tome come to life. Reyes, the oldest stronghold and earliest capital before the period of First Expansion. Its legends boast of being the first to have received the soul words – a title contested by cities Hale and Valet – and, thus, was appropriately named after its giver. The golden weathervane, nearly seven feet in diameter with its pivotal point an effigy of the sun in its reclining splendor, had been gifted by an unknown metallurgist more than a thousand years past, and still remains in peak condition despite half the sun’s nose missing along with most of an arm, the tip of his spear, and part of his bowl of golden figs. The Reyes city council estimates nearly ten-thousand travelers each year who come for a glimpse of the historical relic but of more interest to Lydia is this: Reyes’ status as the oldest economic powerhouse, the earliest record of the water clock, and the chance to witness – and perhaps participate in – an open market.  
  
“ _Please_ , can we go,” Kira wheedles, presently. “It is market day and we ate the last of our rations last night and I smell _lamb_ , don’t you?”  
  
“I don’t know if my instincts are telling me Malia is somewhere there or that I’m only hungry,” Scott admits. “I suppose we can attempt killing two birds with one stone, if everyone agrees.”  
  
Lydia feels the heady rush of anticipation entering into her bloodstream, her foot taking the eager half-step forward, before she is pulled back by an ever-reminding tide. The feeling that sweeps through her is every bit as bitter and disconcerting as the waves that had consumed her, the one and only time she had ever visited the ocean. Every bit as dismaying as the expression on her grandmother’s face upon finding her five-year old granddaughter soaked to the bone, as when Lydia had been forbidden near the waters again.  
  
She glances down to find Stiles now cross-legged in the grass, his head tilted back infinitesimally, watching her as carefully as he always has. The last time they had been in this situation, Lydia had felt only rage – rage at how gentle his eyes looked in his presumptions, how shamelessly he had sought her secrets – but, now, some new emotion altogether must bleed through from her eyes, the constricting of her throat, because Stiles is climbing to his feet, exhaustion and gravel crunching beneath his boots in the same exhale.  
  
What he saw, Lydia does not even want to consider, but somehow she finds herself wondering all the same when he winds Roscoe’s reins around one hand, says, “As that one elder from Calavera always likes to say, there’s no time like the present.”

 

* * *

 

 **V. Aldebaran  
** _I begged the wind to carry my words **  
** A prayer meant only for you **  
** I had shouted, **  
** If to no one else **  
** Let me bare myself to you_

 

* * *

  
  
They leave faithful Roscoe with a stableman – with Stiles assuring that no one was about to steal a hundred-year-old horse – “Well, they might if they actually believe him to be that old,” Kira points out – but carry the rest of their belongings.  
  
Lydia lingers and considers staying behind with the horse, but Stiles has been watching her ever since they entered the city gates so she chooses to shadow Kira instead. That is, until Scott decides the four should split to cover more ground.  
  
“Martin, if you could keep an eye on Stiles,” the boy-king asks apologetically and without one hint of expectancy, and so that had been that.  
  
Lydia now follows behind him as they meander through the narrower streets of the open market. From either side, merchants are shouting from beneath tarped stalls, touting everything from spices to baubles. Spiced lamb and ham hocks and entire skinned chickens hang from the tents of meat merchants, their cartable smokehouses billowing clouds thick enough to cling to Lydia’s clothes and tongue. Others sell spices in twenty different colors, vegetables Lydia has never seen before, glass-spun trinkets and silverware. She catches glimpses of uncut rubies from one stall, cut rubies from another, and one stall boasts bolts of cloth so numerous Lydia wonders how it has not yet collapsed. And she does not – cannot – admit it, but each sight leaves her even more fascinated.  
  
Lydia wonders whether it is like this in the capital, as well – people pushing past her from all sides, rushing, bargaining, tasting. Here, there is no one and no room to veer away from her, to glance and condemn in whispers; here, Lydia is as irrelevant to them as is a drop to the ocean. As she stands there and contemplates this, watching as Stiles browses through a selection of bound books while a nearby merchant attempts to solicit her, the strangest feeling begins to bloom within her ribcage.  
  
One that spreads to the joints of her bones, has her turning to the merchant and listening as he explains to her the theatrical history of painted masks and the necessity of them for protection against ghouls, how _he_ alone carries wares crafted – and blessed – by the Yukimura mountain shamans, themselves. She watches as he turns to attend to other customers, leaving her to browse through his selection. The strange feeling grows and Lydia reaches out, allows her fingers to skim the smooth, oiled wood of a mask painted varying shades of green, red, and white –  
  
“Unlike him, Kira can probably obtain you one free of charge,” Stiles’ voice says mildly, from beside her.  
  
She slides him a cool glance, but he is studying the array of masks with his lower lip caught between his teeth. A shudder ripples through him.  
  
“I know they’re made to scare away the ghouls,” he says then to the owner, “but suppose I’m the one who dies first from fright. Do you carry an insurance policy of some kind?”  
  
The owner looks at Stiles as if he is simultaneously the worst and most interesting creature the owner has ever had looking at his wares. He addresses Lydia, gesturing at Stiles, “This one yours, Mistress?”  
  
Calmly, Lydia gives him a look as if to say _unfortunately_ , although her fingers tremble, warm and sweaty and curled in on themselves. There is something about the rush of bodies around her, the rising and waning of noises around her, the smell of smoked meat and sticky sweets that has made her reckless. As Stiles and the owner get into a heated discussion about the merits of insurance for such items and whether the Yukimura shamans offer that as well, Lydia slowly lets out a breath she hadn’t even known she was holding. She picks up the green, red, and white mask from earlier and does nothing to stop the whim spreading through her mind, if slipping the mask over her head is any indication.  
  
And so when Stiles pauses long enough to notice her absence, says, “Martin – ” and then louder again, more worriedly, she sneaks under his arm and pops her head into view.  
  
Stiles nearly sends the table toppling with him.  
  
“ _Fuck!_ ” he bites out and receives a scowl from a neighboring woman. Stiles swallows, revises politely, “Mercy.” Then he is pulling Lydia aside to avoid both wares and disapproving looks, hisses, “What the _hell,_ Martin.”  
  
A sharp, startled sound bursts from her, echoing violently inside the mask, and Lydia finds herself stilling with surprise. A feeling as unexpected as the noise settles into a blanket over her skin, warming the very center of her heart, curving around her mouth, and Lydia recognizes with a kind of wonder that this is the same emotion that has been growing within her – that this is _delight_ – she is _delighted._ Hadn’t she felt this same way countless moons ago, when she and Allison had taken turns leaping from the branches of the crabapple tree until they were unable to stand from laughing?

 

* * *

* * *

 

Martin _laughs,_ and Stiles feels his stomach drop for another reason entirely. The sound is short and borderline dissonant and Stiles feels the hairs rising along his skin, considers – even as he watches her shoulders stiffen in what can only be equal surprise – what he can offer to hear it again. Listen closer and better, this time.  
  
The mask slides down, over her face, and he can only stand there as some violent, unknown sentiment rises within him. Wonder, he parses after a long moment, and fondness – two traits he has come to associate with Martin. Martin, whose eyes shine with a quiet, vigilant insight, who sleeps curled up with that cane of hers. Martin, who has always managed to capture his attention without ever trying to.  
  
And so it is the third emotion that startles him, because it could be called longing – _would_ be called by some doe-eyed, curly-haired bard – but Stiles has never been one to wax poetics and so he is left standing there, acknowledging the presence of greed, plain and simple. Because as Martin raises her eyes, there is a crinkling in the corners; there is a parting of lips, a pinch to one side of her mouth that can so easily be mistaken for ridicule but it’s _not_.  
  
He trembles to look at her now, when time and space seem to stop existing beyond the two of them.  
  
_My god,_ he thinks, in the same way he had when he held her hand that first time beneath the beech tree. He wants to hunch over her, to read every part of her like he’s a soldier on the warfront and she is a letter he cannot bring himself to share with anyone else. He wants to drink the sight of her in until his lungs fill up and he drowns, to reach out and touch that smile tucked into the small, fascinating divots in her cheeks. The longing is enough to bloom, sharp and aching, in the center of his throat, the soles of his feet.  
  
And, well, maybe there is some unspoken part of him capable of waxing poetics. Certainly, there is a large part of him that has always been destined for heartbreak, because he cannot imagine Martin bound to another besides herself and yet, in this moment, he finds himself pleading silently, _Don’t move. Let me drown, looking at you. Let me believe – if just for this one moment – that you are my soulmate_ _._

 

* * *

* * *

  
  
In the end, Scott chalks the hours wasted up to a lack of judgment on his part but Stiles only rolls his eyes, assigns each person an equal piece of the guilt, and suggests they set up camp outside the city walls.  
  
“I refuse to believe you followed the smell of seasoned lamb for the last five miles,” he says, by way of explanation. Scott, who according to Kira had eaten twenty-seven skewers before the vendor began yelling at them, grumbles somewhat doubtfully but acquiesces.  
  
They unpack two miles out, atop a hill overlooking the city. Reyes shines deep into the night with no less than a thousand torches burning and the sky is cold in comparison, distant flecks of frost to civilization’s golden glow. As the moon brightens so Scott and Kira wane until they are pacing on all fours within the confines of the barrier. The two had initially been held in separate circles but this had only resulted in Scott yipping and snarling in equal measures and Stiles nearly having his hair burnt off by a wayward strand of lightning. Together, Scott and Kira are much better behaved – “Makes sense,” as Stiles says, watching as the two sleeping bodies form crescent moons around each other. “Pack dynamics.”  
  
He glances over at Lydia, says, “You should sleep.”  
  
Lydia does not know when she first understood what Allison had told her all those years ago, that there is something bordering physical agony in knowing that a soulmate suffers. Perhaps it was when the shadows began growing longer beneath his eyes, or perhaps it was today, when she walked behind him and first saw the strain of his shoulders, the ease with which he bore both their packs – perhaps it was when she had first lifted him off of his horse almost a fortnight ago.  
  
All she knows is to add another stick to the fire, intent on making him a cup of tea with the dried lavender Kira had bought.  
  
When she brings the cup to where he is sitting with his back against a tree, he wraps his hands around it and stares into the steaming liquid as if he is finding his fortune in its tealeaves. He tells her at length, “You really should sleep.”  
  
She sits carefully down beside him, digs the scuff of her shoes into the dirt and shakes her head. After a moment, she reaches out to pat his knee. He looks up from his cup then, eyes dark and wide, lashes wet from the steam. She taps his knee again, tilts her head.  
  
“Oh,” he mutters. “Yeah, it’s better now,” and she watches the tiny flicker of registration lightening his eyes when he sees that her hand has not left.  
  
She watches, feverish and almost in a daze, as he tentatively, as carefully as if he is expecting her to flee, touches her hand with his, turns it over so that her palm faces upward with all its creases and swirls. Lydia almost wants to clench her hand shut, doesn’t want him to peer too closely because she is sure that if he does, he will see his name stitched in the folds of her lifeline.  
  
“Your hand is so small,” Stiles says, slowly, as though asking a question and the shakiness Lydia feels is only because she is foolish enough to have stopped breathing.  
  
In the next second however, Scott lets out a long howl, which causes Stiles to glance up, brows ticked with irritation – only for his eyes to subsequently widen at whatever he sees.  
  
A short dagger appears in Stiles’ hand in the same breath Lydia feels the muscles under his thigh tense, and her throat stutters because to gain access to a weapon so quickly meant it had to have been hidden somewhere on his body – that Stiles was bound to have _more_ elsewhere on his body – a thought Lydia had never given before. In the face of Scott, Kira, and his scribal occupation, Lydia had never thought to presume Stiles knew just as much – if _any_ – combat. She cannot recall ever seeing him holding a weapon. But, she thinks, he had been present at the battle that led him to her, hadn’t he?  
  
Stiles is looking across their camp and when Lydia’s gaze follows, she sees the reason for Scott’s concern. A shadow larger than any dog overturns their ration supply, tearing into the cured pork with glowing, blue eyes and hackles raised.  
  
“So that’s how it goes,” Stiles murmurs, eying Scott. Then slowly, cautiously, he rises from his seat, dagger still gripped in one hand, says, “Hi, Malia.”  
  
Whereas Scott is calm and Kira skittish, Malia is flat-out aggressive. In the end, she manages to claw through Stiles’ right sleeve and superficial layer of skin before making off into the night with the remains of their meat supply.  
  
“Oh my god,” Stiles says, as Lydia wrangles bandage strips around the wound. “I hadn’t even _eaten_ any.” What Lydia considers even more disturbing than Malia running off with their salted pork is how the boy in front of her is genuinely more upset over this than his sustained injury. She tightens his bandages only to hear his corresponding yelp, and she smiles grimly.  
  
Scott is prowling so close to the barrier that the smell of singed fur begins reeking the air. Saliva drips from his bared fangs and he growls, pushing pointedly against the wall of the barricade.  
  
“We’re too close to the city,” Stiles tells him, but Scott only whines, throws himself more forcefully at the barrier. Provoked by her alpha’s distress, Kira releases an agitated crack of lightning that slams into a nearby tree.  
  
Stiles grits his teeth, says, “ _Listen_ ” _–_  a concept hopelessly lost on the intended audience – “Scott, we are only two miles out from the city. Other people. _Children._ I can’t just release y – ”  
  
The howl Scott releases then is enough to send the ground shaking around them, for Lydia to drop to her knees, her heart sloshing and spilling over the sides of her ribcage. Even after the ground quiets and the trees cease groaning, Lydia still finds her limbs shaking and knows without a shadow of a doubt that what she just witnessed was the presence of a true alpha.  
  
Stiles has managed to stay upright although his hands dig like claws into the trunk of a nearby tree, sweat dripping down his face, and Lydia realizes that what she felt must be tenfold for him – a genuine member of the wolf king’s pack. As she watches, Stiles clenches his eyes shut for a long, stagnant moment before snapping them open, his tone equally cutting when he says, “Apologies, Your Majesty. I’ll just let you go to town on your people then.”  
  
The wolf king steps back as Stiles approaches and the boy does not lower his gaze – meets red, glowing eyes with ones equally daring. Lydia thinks frantically that Stiles had always been the bolder of the two, _why_ did he have to be, and she does not know whether to approach or recede, only knows that she cannot sit still – and so she ends up clutching her cane with both hands.  
  
Stiles stops within a feet of the barrier and lifts his shirt. Lydia has to look away even though she had fallen asleep with him, curled side by side only a few days past, had seen him with less on when she dressed his wounds. But there is something startling, shocking about this – a gesture smooth enough to fuel wonder, to almost present itself as forbidden, and so she _has_ to look away. As she does, Lydia catches a glimpse of what he has been hiding beneath those thick winter serges he always insists on wearing, even though they are still in the dog days and the air swelters even at night. Twin leather straps encircle his torso, one band higher than the other, and both carry an array of weapons in alternating slits – daggers, stilettos, throwing knives and, interestingly enough, needles, among others.  
  
Lydia stares in blank fascination at the trees and wonders if this was what was in those unmentioned parcels they had obtained in her village, wonders if she should begin making a book as well, one full of red lines linking together questions she never knew to ask. When she glances back at him, he has dropped the hem of his shirt and holds in his hand a dagger different from the one he had displayed earlier. This one is larger and weightier, an obscure silver, undoubtedly with a history as intricate as the motif curling around its handle.  
  
“I didn’t want to with Kira,” Stiles tells his king then. “But this time is different. There are too many lives at stake.”  
  
Scott bares his teeth, his eyes flicking to the dagger – ears flattening briefly – but does not otherwise respond. Slowly, the moonlight glinting off of the blade in his hand, Stiles removes some but not all of the mountain ash immediately in front of Scott.  
  
He steps back, says in exasperation, “Well. Do what you have to. I’ll be there to figure out what comes after.”  
  
And then Scott is crashing one last time against the barrier and it is sheer will that drives him through the now weakened wall, singed, still burning tufts of fur flickering off and around him as he emerges on the other side. He does not bother shaking himself off before he disappears into the surrounding trees, leaving a contrail of smoke and dying embers behind him. Kira chitters anxiously from where she is still trapped inside the barricade and this effectively pulls both Lydia and Stiles from their trance.  
  
“Sorry Kira, next time,” Stiles is saying then as he hoists himself onto the back of his horse, already pulling at the reins.  
  
Before he can begin following, Lydia makes a noise that is sharp enough to catch his attention and runs toward him, holding out her grandmother’s cane. It may not be much, but it _has_ been crafted from hickory and embellished with iron and Lydia knows from personal experience that it hurts more than anything else she owns when accidentally dropped – and that it is at least bound to make _somewhat_ of an impression if hit with. But more importantly, she had seen the look on Stiles’ face when he’d threatened his best friend with the dagger. She knows that even if he were to end up facing the worst-case scenario, that he would not take either that or any of his other weapons – _mercy,_ but he had a lot – to his friend and king.  
  
Stiles turns to see her brandishing her cane and something like affection skirts across his bone-weary complexion. “Smart,” he murmurs, and slips the dagger into a spare loop of his belt where it is confined yet well within reach. “You’re right, though. I won’t actually use this.”  
  
He reaches down then, his palm open toward her – not for the cane, which he nudges at her to keep, but for her hand – for _her_ – says, “Come on.”  
  
Thinking back, Lydia will pinpoint this moment as when she first admits herself more than a little in love with him.

 

* * *

 

Scott has cornered Malia against the wall of a steeper crag by the time they reach him. The coyote bristles, her teeth bared, her eyes savage, miniature moons against darker fur. Stiles has to leave Roscoe a suitable distance behind, the horse’s flanks heaving with foam and fear.  
  
When she sees them, Malia’s hackles rise further and a snarl rips through the steady growling she had been issuing. Scott snarls back, louder and deeper, his voice echoing off the rocks above them. In the moonlight, Stiles takes one step forward, hand slowly reaching into the pouch of mountain ash tied at his waist, and it is one step too much.  
  
Malia lets loose a savage snarl and tosses in her proverbial die. She shoots pasts Scott, small enough still to fit through his legs, straight toward where Stiles and Lydia are. Malia has assessed them, Lydia realizes then, and found the two humans lacking against her brute strength – but suitable enough to be a distraction.  
  
Scott roars again like he had in the barrier, only louder, and Lydia instinctively covers her head with her hands, feeling as if her body is being slowly compressed downward. Distantly, she registers hitting her head on some protruding tree root and when the earth finally stops spinning, she finds herself lying to a side on the forest floor. She attempts briefly to prop herself up, only to be pushed down each time by the strange, invisible force.  
  
In front of her, Malia also seems to be suffering the same side-effects, and Lydia wonders if her own eyes are as panicked and unseeing as the coyote’s. Perhaps not, because there does not seem to be a colossal, angry creature bearing down upon her like there is for Malia.  
  
She then feels rather than sees Stiles slide down onto the dirt beside her.  
  
“Please stop doing that,” she hears him says, to no one in particular.

 

* * *

  
  
Lydia returns with Roscoe to their campsite long before dawn, but when she lies down to sleep, she only finds herself waking – checking periodically on Kira who paces restlessly for the remaining hours of night. When the sky changes from dark indigo to a paler, sleepier counterpart, Lydia is already standing, dressed for the day. Water is beginning to bubble over the fire and she roots through the parcels for biscuits and slices of dried fruit, the pork having been taken by Malia last night.  
  
Kira stirs from where she lies, now human, inside the ash circle – Lydia having covered her in a blanket when the first light of dawn had shone. Lydia quickly scoops what can be salvaged of the barrier into a leather pouch before bringing to the other girl warm tea and some breakfast.  
  
“Thank you,” Kira says fervently, gulping down the tea at a pace that would have burned off the tongue of an ordinary human. Her breakfast however, she only picks at – both girls too anxiously watching the woods for any indication of movement.  
  
It is only when the sky has risen into a rosy, scintillating pink that the others return.  
  
Being the only one fully clothed, Stiles leads the way, Lydia’s cane slung across his shoulders like some felling axe. But he proffers it back to her like a sword, extends it with both hands, and says casually, “Thank you. I ended up breaking three toes. Is there pure lead inside, perhaps?”  
  
Behind him, Scott, who is undeniably naked, calls out a greeting before ducking behind a nearby tree.  
  
The girl trailing at his heels is equally naked and twice as confident, with a lithe, golden body smudged in dirt and leaves, and shoulder-length hair that does not leave anything to the imagination. She steps into open sunlight, looking as politely nonplussed as anything as she observes the provisional campsite.  
  
Then Kira is leaping to her feet, crying, “ _Malia!_ ” as she rushes forward to hug the mentioned girl, matted leaves and all.  
  
“Kira, hi,” the girl greets, primly, and hugs her back. “Long time no see.” She glances over Kira’s shoulder, taps her, and then suddenly both girls are orienting themselves toward where Lydia is standing.  
  
Nausea rolls through Lydia’s stomach, cold and cloying and familiar. Alone, the girls in Martin had occasionally played with her, but they had never tolerated her in groups. Her: too red, too pale, from a household much too strange. Them: too many rumors and opinions within the same space.  
  
The girl Malia steps forward. “Hello,” she says, cocks her head. “Who are you?”  
  
Stiles walks past her, Scott’s clothes in one arm, and tugs on the end of a short, brown lock. “We already told you,” he tells her. Tells Lydia, “We already told her.”  
  
“They already told me,” Malia confirms and ends up drifting closer, dragging Kira alongside her. “So you cannot speak at all?”  
  
“Malia,” Scott says from behind his tree, a warning.  
  
Malia’s gaze is unnervingly straight when it meets Lydia’s. “I don’t mind,” she says. “I wasn’t able to, either, for eight years.”

 

* * *

 

Malia, despite having a rough few nights, is much too energetic to keep still or – heavens forbid – _sleep_ , and so she and the others head into Reyes again at her insistence. After all, they have no more salted pork and how are they supposed to journey onward with _no meat?_ To which Stiles replies, “Excuse me – first of all, I’m not liking that accusatory tone. Second of all, _you_ ’re the reason we have no more meat.”  
  
This time, Lydia requests to stay behind, miming sleepiness. Initially, it is Stiles who offers to stay with her, then Kira, but she only shoos them off and eventually they go. Roscoe, however, she is persuaded to keep for companionship.  
  
And in truth, she needs time to be alone in the way she had been only a few weeks ago, to retreat from the world that only seems to grow larger around her with every passing day.  
  
From her height, she watches four figures slowly weaving their way across the steppes, toward the city. She watches as Kira hops along, talking to Scott with her hands clasped behind her back, Stiles lagging behind, his head tilted upward, and Malia striding ahead at a relentless pace, turning every so often to presumably yell at the rest of them.  
  
The edges of her heart swell at this sight of them, warm and bittersweet, because the sun is shining just so and she can almost see a fifth figure: dark curls gleaming, weaving among the others as effortlessly as Lydia can never.

 

* * *

 

 **VI. Pollux  
** _Your heart in my hands, it cannot be kept **  
** A warmth all-consuming _  
_And so I weave them into the amaranthine sky_  
_Until they become like the tides,_  
_Drawing closer, reflecting your light_

 

* * *

  
  
In their absence, Lydia finds herself being resorted to tidying up the site for lack of anything better to do – stacks up wood, airs out the beddings. She leads Roscoe out to a clearing when the grass surrounding the camp grows sparse and then to the nearby stream. She eats a late midday meal of biscuits drizzled with honey, brushes off the crumbs for the ants to eat, and then she finds herself reaching for the sack she had brought from home. She sets her stack of letters in her lap and gently unravels the twine.  
  
It is under the shadow of a tree, seemingly a thousand miles away from where she first received them, that Lydia revisits her dearest friend’s letters. The looping, cursive words – no two consecutive _a_ ’s written the same – is nostalgic to the verge of heartbreak and Lydia almost puts them away again – too soon, she thinks. But it is this same nostalgia that has her reading letter after letter, her eyes catching on each word as if it were the first time. As if doing so would help breathe Allison back into this world again. And somewhere along the way – somewhere between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth letter – Lydia falls asleep with a kind of fervidity that she hasn’t had in days.  
  
She wakes only to a distant clamoring of voices. Scrambling upward, she sees the king and his companions already nearing the base of the hill. In that moment, she despairs at herself – she doesn’t even _remember_ falling asleep, and now it is nearing _dusk_. Before the others had left, they had promised that they would bring back all kinds of food for a quick supper together before moonrise and Lydia had pointed at the water bucket in return, had promised to contribute to the meal with tea. And now they’ve come back with perhaps only half an hour to spare before nightfall – before they succumb to the draw of the moon – and she has neither tea nor water.  
  
Her still-drowsy state only serves to amplify these thoughts and Lydia thinks to herself, _if I hurry, at least I can make it to the stream and back before they arrive._

 

* * *

  
  
As she returns, the water bucket banging against her knees with every step, she sees a pale spot of white lying a little ways before her. Dragging herself and the bucket along, she moves closer toward it – cautiously, at first – and then not at all.  
  
 The bucket thuds into the grass, forgotten, cold waves of water washing over her feet and into the dirt around her.  
  
In front of her, innocuous and facedown, lies a sheet of parchment.  
  
Lydia feels it when her heart drops from its cage, drowns in the mud freshly formed beneath her. She feels it when her vision narrows and spots bloom hot and waxen behind her eyes.  
  
What she doesn’t feel is her walking that last stretch to the campsite, the way the walls of her heart continue to beat, the letter gripped in a hand much too sick to tremble.  
  
When she enters into the grove, she sees it. Letters, scattered by the wind, pieces of white strewn across grounds she had tidied not five hours before. Letters she had – carelessly, _stupidly_ – overlooked in her haste. She had left for water only to come back with nothing – _to_ nothing.  
  
The others look up when she enters. Of course they do – of course they are already here, and for the first time Lydia thinks she can fully appreciate Stiles’ gibes at the unbreachable difference stretching between the supernatural and their slower, weaker counterparts.  
  
For a long moment, not even the wind dares to blow.  
  
Then, “Martin,” Kira says, small, helplessly, and –  
  
_You had no right._  
  
Some emotion, strange and terrible, breaks loose from Lydia’s chest then, surges up with a force that causes her to lurch one step toward them – toward letters that had been ordered by date, had only ever been creased in three places, that still carried with it the lingering scent of magnolia cream.  
  
In that same instant, she feels a shout welling up in her lungs, furious and desperate, _Did you read them?_ but how could she ask this when she already knows. She knows from the way Scott is looking at her, his eyes large and hurt, from the guilty, tense cut of Kira’s figure, how she permits her hair to sweep past her cheeks. Lydia knows because she does not – _cannot_ – shift her gaze beyond them, to where Stiles is surely still crouching, his knee pressed against the cold dirt, the expression his face must hold –  
  
In that moment, the thought flashes through her mind, a despair and a sigh in one: _It is gone_.  
  
_What is?_ echoes back, afraid.  
  
Her world. Grandmother. Allison. This.  
  
_You,_ she thinks to the boy kneeling there, wayward letters clutched in his hand.  
  
She had never meant to keep any of them, for what does an oracle know besides the certainty of death? But fire could not be kept to begin with. It belonged to nothing but the air it consumed. It knew nothing but to burn bright; a single brush was enough to leave a lasting impression.  
  
Lydia has selfishly and conveniently forgotten.  
  
_You had no right_ , she thinks to herself. Where she had stepped forward before, she now takes a single step back. _You had no right to insert yourself into all this and blindly hope that he and anyone else would escape unscathed – that you would. You should have fled from Yannic that night. You should have thrown that boy out once those first words left his mouth._  
  
_Lydia,_ her grandmother chides. She is five years old standing inside their room at the inn, her dress dripping saltwater onto the rug. _Lydia, Lydia. What have you done?_  
  
Lydia takes another step. Then another. In front of her, the others are slowly waking from their state of fugue. A stray piece of parchment hastens its journey across the grass, propelled upward by a sharp breath of wind. Malia turns to give chase.  
  
Scott is the one to open his mouth and Stiles says, “Martin,” but it is her grandmother who calls after her as she flees, thorns and thickets scraping retribution deep into her skin.  
  
_What have you done?  
_  
Twelve years later, the answer is the same. _I’ve fallen in when I had only meant to look._

 

* * *

  
  
Her grandmother had forbidden her from returning to the waves for what remained of their visit. Instead, Lydia built mounds along the shoreline, scavenged for fresh mussels like those seabirds that circle above and, every once in a while, glanced longingly at the sparkling, inviting water. “It is for your own good,” her grandmother explained in that practical way of hers. “You cannot swim, and neither can I. What would we do if you were to drown? As your grandmother, it is my responsibility to protect you from further danger.”  
  
But her grandmother is not here now. Nor Allison, nor the sovereign king or his loyal advisors. There is no one to rebuke her, to warn her away from uncharted waters and remind her to _for once, think of the consequences_ – would she have listened anyway – and so when the shadow materializes from behind her, Lydia goes willingly.

 

* * *

 

She comes to, propped upright on a large, wooden chair. Her hands and legs are strapped when she tries lifting them. Lydia forces herself to breathe, to look around the mostly stygian surroundings, save for a small family of wax candles flickering near where she is reclining. The only other presence she can discern is a table beside her chair, a cloth covering the somewhat lumpy material underneath. Upon closer inspection, Lydia notices that the wooden legs have been stained in dark, haphazard splatters and only now does her skin allow understanding to be absorbed, a cold and disbelieving dread trickling in lieu of her blood. Lydia tests the straps on her wrists, harder now.  
  
“Mistress Martin,” and she jumps, whirls her head to watch as a man steps forward from the shadows. He is clean shaven, tidy in a grey healers robe and there is a small, avuncular smile etched into his face.  
  
“It is a pleasure. Doctor Valack,” he introduces. “I’ve long been an ardent admirer of your family although _you_ have earned a special place in my heart. You will have plenty of time to learn as we progress; but as of now, time waits for no man. Schrader, if you would,” the doctor instructs, and another figure is slinking out, a mask rendering only his eyes visible. He places one hand on either side of Lydia’s face, holding her down, and a wild, unintentional sound escapes from her. She pulls earnestly at her leather straps and hears her breath coming in long-drawn gasps, wishes desperately for Stiles’ way with words, for Scott or Kira’s strength. From above her, the man’s eyes stare down – a shade of brown so vacant, so unlike Stiles, that she is reminded of him all the more and nearly weeps.  
  
“Mistress Martin,” she hears Valack say, and then his face is replacing Schrader’s overhead. In his hand is an instrument Lydia does not recognize, does not _want_ to recognize, and the doctor bears down on her, saying, “I will now begin the process of vocal appreciation. I may not be as pretentious as my contemporaries, but I do hope you’ll find the results satisfactory, all the same.”  
  
He is true to his word. He makes certain she never forgets to scream.

 

* * *

  
  
Inside the void, there is no rising and setting of the sun to mark the days; only a cesspool of memories and the doctor’s voice. There is a certain loneliness to the man that comes spilling forth on occasion, magnifying the long lulls of silence.  
  
He tells her about his work, his devotion to the forgotten practice of amplification. _Like the moon augments the waves, so we can harness our heightened selves through physical exposure,_ he explains. He tells her about his success, his third eye, about the Dread Doctors and how _they thought me too proud, too reckless, and so they took it away from me. My eye, my work. Everything._  
  
He praises her. He tells her how she alone can save him and his reputation. _I have been following you for quite some time,_ he tells her, and she sees a flash of her grandmother’s house as would have been seen from among the woods, of the remnants of a campfire, of the narrow streets of Reyes. _All the others_ – a burst of blackened wings, a boy with bleeding, vacant eyes, Matron Cross lying facedown – _have failed me. But you?_  
  
Her, he will never allow, and Lydia learns to read his moods in lieu of the weather. He is happiest when he drills and taps and scrapes, and Lydia has learned to shy away from the faint, telltale lifting of his voice. When he is inspirited or provoked, he will drill her for hours on end in another manner. He teaches her how the smell of death clings differently to every person, how to track the scent as would a bloodhound, teaches her with his soft voice and iron-hard grip until she can crawl into another’s mind. She sees Theo on the drawbridge, gazing benevolently down upon his sister. She sees Malia, claws stuck in her mother’s throat. She sees Valack, sliding the plague mask over Matron Cross’s head.  
  
The smell each encounter leaves behind clings to Lydia’s hair and skin, burrows under her flesh until maggots breed from the stench, until she is screaming and clawing and retching – sometimes alone in her mind, sometimes convulsing in her chair until Schrader has to knock her unconscious. But only ever for so long, because the doctor simply whisks her along to the next person – ever gently, ever relentlessly.  
  
Gradually, gratefully, his presence begins to disappear from her mind. First for brief lulls of silence, then for seemingly days on end.  
  
_You are building immunity,_ Allison explains. She and Lydia are standing in Allison’s old room, the one that overlooked the main road and stood above the bakery.  
  
Lydia watches her oldest friend choose an intricate whalebone comb. The mother-of-pearl backing winks iridescent in the sunlight as Allison runs it through her hair. _Will you stay with me until it is over?_  
  
Allison laughs into the mirror, her silver-bright earrings twinkling. _Don’t be dramatic,_ she says. _You’re not dying._  
  
_Aren’t I,_ Lydia says wryly.  
  
_Not yet,_ Allison allows. _Valack won’t allow it. Not until he fulfills his purpose._  
  
His purpose. _Frequency and intent._ The first, with which to incapacitate the enemy. The second, to wear the mask that will allow for the first. _Frequency and intent, Lydia,_ and Valack repeats these two words for limitless hours, his voice echoing and omnipotent inside this vast space, trying to make his mantra hers, trying to make her his.  
  
_Don’t be scared,_ Allison says. _Neither Scott nor Stiles will let that happen._  
  
Lydia opens her mouth, an amalgamation of _That isn’t why I’m scared_ and _That’s exactly why I’m scared_ curled, ready, on her tongue, when she catches glimpse of Allison’s reflection. It is enough for Lydia’s throat to well shut, for all semblance of thought to scatter from her like birds in flight.  
  
Slowly, Lydia lowers herself onto the bedding. She takes in the pinch between dark brows; she catalogues the infinitesimal stillness to the planes of her face and the look much too determined to be directed at anything but its own soul. Lydia recognizes that reflection in the mirror – it is the same one that stares back at her after a particularly terrible vision, after her grandmother had left, after long gaps in Allison’s letters – and Lydia recognizes that those words had not been meant for her.  
  
As if she had spoken these revelations aloud, Allison catches her eye, says, _Isn’t it strange, how we don’t allow those we love to worry on our behalf, only to find ourselves worrying on theirs?_

 

* * *

  
  
_You and your hair have grown exceedingly tragic since my death, Lydia of Martin_ , Allison says somewhere between brushing her own silken locks and frowning over Lydia’s, and Lydia thinks of those first, barren weeks after knowing – of letting the manor fall into ruins, time suspend within the cellar, feasting on increasingly hard hardtacks. She thinks, _so I have and it along with me._  
  
Thinks, _I have grown lonely too_ and knows this all to be some fever dream because Allison is replying to her as easily as if she had spoken aloud, _So you have. Not so much anymore, I think.  
_  
No, and Lydia considers this: how Scott would secretly drop his carrots for the horse and Kira always somehow found out and would start lamenting about _wasting_ and _rationing_ even though Lydia clearly saw her that one time sneaking Roscoe an entire rutabaga. How much Stiles would bleat when it was his turn to gut the fish, only for Malia to roll her eyes and push him aside. There is something preciously mundane about these memories, a soft glow similar to the ones that surround Allison and earlier, simpler years.  
  
_No,_ Lydia would have to agree, a tinge of careful neutrality coloring her words. _Not so much recently._  
  
Not so much _now_ , with Allison perched on the edge of her dressing table and Lydia with her legs curled up on the bed, the last vestiges of an afternoon sun wafting through the open window. Lydia flops backwards, feels the soft cotton cool against her arms, and wouldn’t mind if this was what was waiting for her after death; wonders if Allison has her room then perhaps grandmother has her house, too.  
  
Allison snorts. _You’re not dying, Lydia._ _Valack is never going to let you go with the kind of unconscious resistance you’re building – it only shows him your eligibility to wear the mask, regardless of the danger it poses. You are becoming to him what Mason is for the Dread Doctors. Doctors are proud creatures, Lydia, seeking fame and prestige. You will be Valack’s_.  
  
Lydia says, _If you’re saying this to comfort me, I can attest the effect to be lackluster at best,_ and Allison replies, _I’m not saying it to comfort you. I’m saying it to give you_ hope.  
  
Lydia feels a pit of annoyance stir within her but mostly, she is tired. _Hope for what?_ she says, not nearly half as rhetorical as she had intended. She presses a cheek into the bedding, watching through sifting strands of her hair as her friend searches through her drawers. _Alli, what have I left to hope in, here or out there?_  
  
The answer is always the same, simple and impossible and painful. _Stiles_.

 

* * *

  
  
Here is a little-known difference between Allison and Lydia: they are both good at running.  
  
_That isn’t much of a difference,_ Allison points out.  
  
_It would be if you’d let me finish.  
_  
_Oh, by all means then.  
_  
It is this. Despite whatever uncertainty may lurk beneath her skin, Allison has always run _toward_ , but Lydia has only ever run from. The memory blooms as painful as any lesion.  
  
_I ran from them,_ she whispers to Allison, nauseated. _They didn’t do anything, but I still ran from them. I read their letter from Deaton just as accidentally all those weeks ago – and still I ran from them. I’ve always been running, even as I beg for them to chase me._ ‘Them,’ she says, because she means it – all of them – sweet Scott and Kira and Malia and – her throat hiccups, constricts. ‘Them,’ because she cannot bear to single him out, to even _think_ of him as she is now.  
  
_How selfish I am,_ she thinks then, and a sick prickling breaking out across her skin, the kind that has always made her want to curl up tight beneath her bedding. She hears herself repeat aloud, distant and removed, _how selfish I am._  
  
Allison has since turned in her chair so that she fully faces Lydia when she says, _There is not a creature alive who isn’t. And while some people are blinded by their inability to see their own follies,_ your _follies, Lydia, are all you see and that too is a kind of blindness.  
  
_ Her words fall on ears deafened by a louder rustling of thoughts, their wings crowding, whispering, _it cannot be so anymore. It cannot go on like this, Lydia,_ until it is all she knows, until the words slip from her mouth raw and begging, _Alli, how can I change?_ Alli, who has always been Lydia’s gateway to the world that existed outside grandmother’s fences, even now when she no longer exists in that world. Alli, who has always been implausibly tolerant of Lydia’s stranger quirks. Alli, who has always been Lydia’s better half. _  
  
_ Alli, who says, _If anything, what you are truly most selfish about, perhaps, is attempting to help others without allowing them even the thought of helping you in return.  
_  
Lydia feels her stomach curdle at the implication. _I cannot,_ she says. _You know I cannot_.  
  
_Not with words, but choices, Lydia.  
_  
_I cannot,_ she says again, desperate, and Allison throws up her hands in a gesture of utter exasperation.  
  
_Why can’t you, Lydia? What convinces you that the choices you have made thus far are the right ones? My god, Lydia. Look at where you have ended up – a madman’s lair.  
_  
Lydia says, half-defensively, half-doggedly, _It is not so much about me as it is the others._  
  
_Ah._ Allison nods with an exaggerated sense of understanding – a telltale gesture of her slow, simmering ire. _And you think you being here will help them because, if anything, you will soon be written from their lives. That this will help Stiles because you will not be around to cause his death and his regret. Tell me, then,_ she says. _What will Stiles feel when his soulmark_ _bleeds black upon your death, Lydia, with no clear explanation? What will happen, when Scott and his pack cannot escape quickly enough from the curse because the only known oracle to ever_ willingly _offer her services is dead? What regrets will_ you _carry into your grave, Lydia, knowing how you’ve left those you have grown to love to dangle unknowingly, like leaves awaiting a tempest?  
_  
As Allison studies her friend’s expression, a small, gentle smile unfurls across her mouth and she says, _If you would look at yourself now. You are not so selfish after all, my love._  
  
It is in that moment that horror crashes over Lydia, and she can do nothing to barricade herself against it, can do nothing but bury her face into the bedding as waves of sickening revelation flood through her. And then she is pleading to Allison, to anyone – desperately, as if confessing to the crime could somehow reverse it all –  _I had only wanted to save him. Oh, god, please. That’s all, I promise. I never meant to fall in love with him. I never meant to love any of them._  
  
Her friend’s words are as rueful as they are understanding. _I know, my love. It happens to the best of us._

 

* * *

  
  
Somewhere, somehow, Lydia falls asleep, sprawled on Allison’s quilts, and when she next regains consciousness it is to Valack’s voice and presence pressing in against her from all sides.  
  
_That took a small amount of readjusting,_ he says, extremely pleased. _You surprise me more every day, dear girl. Did you know – and I may have alluded briefly to this – that I also had the pleasure of being acquainted with your grandmother?_  
  
And because there is no privacy within this void of hers, because sometimes she thinks the doctor subsists on her reactions as he would bread, she understands what he means. She sees her grandmother as she had looked last – wiry and bold and grey streaks in her hair – and yet, somehow, Lydia is struck by how much _younger_ Lorraine of Martin seems. There are the same lines and folds as in Lydia’s memory, the same slim neckline and poise, and Lydia realizes it is not her grandmother who is younger but herself who has grown older.  
  
She sees her grandmother tied to this same chair, a younger Valack – his third eye still in place – standing over her as he will her granddaughter, crying as she says, _help me, help me,_ and Lydia feels herself beginning to shake, wants to throw up because my god, her grandmother – her _grandmother_ had never begged. Not when the villagers had set fire to the outer borders of her field, not when they had dragged and beaten her, not when she saw those visions terrible enough to leak blood instead of tears. But Lorraine of Martin is sobbing, pleading _please, please_ in this memory, and Valack tells the woman kindly, _It is because you broke the law, Lorraine. You know fate cannot be mocked._  
  
_Please,_ says Lorraine. _I couldn’t stand it – I couldn’t – I had to try –_  
  
_So try you did, and look where it has landed you._ The doctor _tsks_ , so very disappointed. _You are half-useless to me, now. You understand._  
  
_Please, you have to save Maddy. I’ll do anything.  
_  
_Grief has tampered with your reasoning, Lorraine. The dead cannot be brought back,_ Valack says and slips from his pocket the same tool he will use on Lydia. _The dead cannot be salvaged. Only the living. And sometimes, not even then._  
  
_You cannot let the pain of your decisions control you_ , an older Valack tells Lydia now, as her grandmother’s ensuing screams fade into the muted background. _Not if you want to reach your fullest potential. Learn from your beloved grandmother. Not much more different than you, she both loved and feared to lose and so, when the right time came, she took her chance and, as you can see, paid the price. You cannot control fate – it is stronger than moon, older than the sun, more constant than the tides. There are many rules we can bend, but some are forever unyielding._  
  
Lydia understands only that there is a vicious, widening tear existing somewhere on her body – that there _has to be_ , because there can be no other explanation for the north wind seeping into her bones, for how the remains of light left within her is being physically pulled out until she cannot seem to catch her breath from crying. And Lydia does not know – does not _care_ – if she is lucid or dreaming anymore, only knows that she cannot stop remembering: her grandmother begging, the horror in her voice, Valack standing over her. The mask sitting innocuously on the table behind them.  
  
_What happened to her?_ The words fall – loud, soft, equally desperately – from Lydia without touching her lips, as if keeping her body in this still, immobile state will prevent the horror from taking root, from becoming bitter, sick reality.  
  
_I’m sure you can begin to guess,_ Valack says, watching Lydia closely – his eyes luminous like a cat’s, hunting for mice in the dark of night. _What did your grandmother instruct you, when you had your first vision?_  
  
What Lorraine of Martin had instructed to her granddaughter was this: to never utter the words. No matter how much you want to, my dear. For those like us, fate cannot be fought with words but with choices.  
  
Presently, Valack says, _Did you realize, in kingdoms outside of ours, oracles are often revered –_ bansídes, _you are called, and are bound only to the most noble of families. But whatever the realm, your role will ever remain the same: a harbinger of death, the thunderous voice of Fate. Soothsayers dabble in prescriptions and gold coins, and so they are held accountable to human laws. But your eyes have been blessed by the dew of the heavens, and so it is to these same heavens you are held accountable._  
  
He says, _Do you wonder why your grandmother instructed you never to tell another the words of their prophecy? Because words have held power since the sun first carved them into man, and to do so would be to defy the heavens. And to defy the heavens would be to invite petty, unmitigated wrath upon the very thread you are trying to deliver from iron-fisted fate._  
  
And Lydia feels the center of her chest caving in, piece by piece, memory by memory, because she realizes now what her grandmother must have done. She feels every thought being consumed, cold and savagely, by the impossibility of how she could have ever dreamed of ending up differently, when even her grandmother could not.  
  
_Power,_ Valack tells her, _always comes at a price. And_ your _price, dear Lydia, will be the devastation of a kingdom._

 

* * *

  
  
At some point, Lydia knows she is screaming outwardly, out there where she is tangible, where Valack’s hands gouge wrist-deep deep into her skull, but she does not understand how that is possible when she is already drowning inside her head. How can she still scream when her lungs have been liquefied along with what remains of her body? But somewhere through the haze, the pain, the wet, continuous trickling of blood, she remembers Finstock’s chickens and how they would run around headless and he would just laugh and laugh and she thinks, maybe the mind is the first to go. Maybe, in the end, it will not even matter if I am here because it is my body Valack needs.  
  
And a small, terrible portion of her is relieved, because the pain – this pain is too much to bear.  
  
_Soon now. You will be a masterpiece Lydia, and I will be there to reap the glory.  
_

 

* * *

 

The tip of Allison’s nose is a lustrous pink and Lydia knows she has been crying.  
  
_What’s wrong?_ she says, sitting down beside her best friend and tugging her close. _What has happened?_  
  
Allison slants her a baleful look, hunching in on herself. _You know._  
  
_I don’t unless you tell me,_ Lydia replies honestly, even as something mildly unpleasant is swelling in the back of her mind, in the cavity behind her forehead.  
  
Allison sighs and scrubs at her eyes with the underside of her sleeves. _You,_ she says angrily, _are a real chore, Lydia of Martin,_ and Lydia is stunned into a small lapse of silence before saying, _If it helps, I don’t mean to be._  
  
_I_ know _you don’t. You don’t mean to be, and that is why you are. Just for once – for_ once _– instead of the other way around or instead of insisting on doing it yourself, would it be so hard to let us save your life?  
_  
There is a long moment where Lydia finds herself caught on the ‘us’ – partly because she does not understand, and partly so she does not have to. Her headache intensifies and she rubs futilely at her temples, wishing suddenly for her grandmother’s birch leaves – but then, hadn’t that last batch already been used on –  
  
_I don’t want my life saved at another’s expense,_ she says, at length. _  
_  
Allison scowls at her, angry all over again. _Then would you rather have your life sacrificed in vain? You heard Valack, Lydia. You know what he is planning to do. Not only will you die, but so will thousands of others in this kingdom, including your soulmate. Including_ mine.  
  
The feeling that had been steadily expanding ruptures, thick and scalding, behind Lydia’s eyes. She sinks forward into her hands, into the grass, thinks, _ah, that’s right._ She remembers. She had been trying to forget, but she remembers now. Valack, the Dread Doctors.  There is no point in hiding from it. The pain is too much for her to bear.  
  
And then, even more so – her grandmother, lying in this same chair, noises coming from her that Lydia will never forget as long as she lives. Pain, terror, and above all, _regret_ – and then Lydia is saying _, I can’t let that happen. Oh god, Alli, I can’t. I can’t do this anymore, the running.  
_  
_Then don’t,_ Allison says, as easy as anything, not a curl out of place. _Fight.  
_

 

* * *

  
  
It was Lydia who had read the manuscripts sent by Allison’s father all those years ago, and so Allison does not repeat the advantages of the Mongolian draw as compared to its Mediterranean and Flemish counterparts. She does, however, translate the knowledge from bow to voice.  
  
_Valack taught you strength but not accuracy, because accuracy isn’t needed when he plans on releasing you to the world like a flock of winter fowl,_ Allison explains, tapping her chin. _To him, you are napalm in excess – a fatal, single-play gamble. We’ll need to condense that potential into an element you can control._  
  
_How?_ Lydia asks.  
  
_How anyone makes an arrow,_ Allison says. _Straight lines, tapering, and decades of practice,_ and she grins at the last one, pleased with herself. _Let’s try cupping your hands, first – use it to help direct the sound._  
  
Cupping her hands seems only to narrow the base of Lydia’s screams, no matter the variation, and by the time she stops, her throat burns like wildfire, the taste of iron creeping up strong onto her tongue. Even worse, blood drips steadily from Allison’s nose and ears – has been for what must be _hours_. But Allison only laughs, waves Lydia’s concern aside and says, _At least you’ve learned to focus your screams, somewhat._ _And as if such a thing would harm me when I’m already dead._  
  
Lydia swallows and it hurts for another reason entirely. _Don’t say that,_ she says.  
  
_But it’s true,_ and Allison pecks her on the cheek, leans back to smile with full-blown dimples and charm. A smile Lydia has seen her wear when someone is about to receive several pieces of her mind – and then the reminder is wrapping itself around Lydia’s heart, gripping her so tightly she sees spots.  
  
_Now,_ says Allison, perfectly oblivious. _What do you think about small diameter arrows?_  
  
And so it goes. Hours pass, perhaps even days and years in this vast, timeless place until all Lydia can remember is how to sharpen her voice, how to expand her lungs and constrict her throat until they are in perfect equilibrium, how to shape her mouth and tongue and teeth and the posture of her feet. How to and how not to, until she cannot differentiate between anything else.  
  
Finally, when distant rumblings begin staining the skies above them a grim, mottled grey, the two girls lie on their backs in the open fields, hands interwoven in the grass between them. Small, white mites of ash rain down around them, onto them, and Allison says, _I remember when we used to lie like this when it snowed in your grandmother’s yard, catching the flakes with our tongues until we nearly froze to death.  
_  
Lydia says, _I dare you to catch_ these _flakes with your tongue,_ and Allison says, _Why, Lydia, I would almost think that is fraudulence I hear in your voice_ , and suddenly – the familiarity of Allison’s presence beside her, her hand in hers, the past how many hours, _days_ – is too much.  
  
_I miss you so much,_ Lydia hears herself saying, and then she is crying in gulps, breath leaving her chest sharp and painful, hurting so much she has to sit up lest she drowns. She presses a fist to her chest as if this would somehow help prevent her heart from breaking further.  
  
_I know,_ Allison says, and her warm weight wraps around Lydia, tight and familiar. _And we will never not miss each other. But each reminder will grow only fonder in time, until they are not so much a burden as a shining memory – a bright cloud above us to gaze at no matter the season. Memories we will be glad we were a part of.  
_  
Lydia only says, _You’re not a burden. Please don’t leave again_ , and Allison laughs, replies, _Silly, don’t you know? I’ll always be right beside you._  
  
The sky is weeping in earnest now, the wind howling. _Don’t leave me_ , Lydia says, desperate, looking into warm eyes, and Allison squeezes her hands, says, _I believe in you, Lydia of Martin. I love you so, so much._  
  
Around them, the world shudders once, and Lydia can still feel Allison’s hands gripping hers, but her voice has become both louder and farther away, echoing around Lydia as their surroundings begin to melt. _It’s time, Lydia. Don’t forget to cup your hands like we’ve practiced! Also, don’t forget to kiss Yannic and the others for me – and to remind Scott how much I still love him because, you’ll see, he can be a little forgetful sometimes. Lyd, Lyd, most of all, don’t forget: It’s all right to want to live_ _– you_ have _to live –_  
  
Then the sky is rending apart, its contents roaring down towards Lydia in a deluge darker than the bottom of the ocean, darker than death. For a moment Lydia forgets how to breathe let alone shriek, wants to turn back to Allison and say, _no, wait, I’m not yet ready_ , but when has time ever waited for the unwilling?  
  
So Lydia only lifts her face up to the advancing sky, does not forget to cup her hands around her mouth, and  
  
_screams_.

 

* * *

  
  
She stays conscious long enough to see half of Valack’s face sliding like melted candlewax off his head, long enough to think, _Power always comes at a price._

 

* * *

  
  
Someone is talking about her. No, she thinks upon closer inspection, someone is speaking _to_ her.  
  
“Martin,” the voice says. “ _Lydia._ Lydia, I’m going to need you to open your eyes.”  
  
Her eyes flutter open in the same instant her breath catches, deep and hurting in her chest.  
  
Splotches of stark contrast swim above her – a face, Lydia thinks – one that, after slow, painful moments and blinks of her eyes, clears out enough for her to recognize as Stiles.  
  
Even half-formed, this realization is enough to push her heart into her throat. _Stiles._  
  
_Scott and Stiles will never let that happen.  
_  
She stares up at her soulmate’s face in both consternation and that strange, near overwhelming flood of wonder. Of joy. Her vision blurs out of focus again and, distantly, she recognizes the awful weeping noise as having to belong to her.  
  
“I – oh, no, please don’t,” she hears Stiles say, the sight of her tears clearly more terrifying than the rest of the situation. There is a thin, choking despair to his voice and she wonders what color his eyes are now. “Lydia? Lydia, you’ll be all right,” but when she only cries harder he panics, says, “Oh, fuck, what the fuck, what the _fu_ – SCOTT. Scott, get your ass over here – oh my god, all right, Lydia, you’re going to have to tell me what’s wrong – clearly there are a _million things_ wrong right now, but what in particular – ”  
  
So Lydia does.  
  
She feels the fluttering of warm, solid hands over her. Hears the voice of Scott shouting, “I’m a little preoccupied here” and Stiles shouting back, “Then _stop being preoccupied_ – have or have you not been gifted with supernatural strength” and Allison whispering, _Don’t be scared_ into the mirror.  
  
So Lydia tells him as the lull of waves crashes over her, pulling her back under and drowning that tiny, protesting voice screaming _no, don’t_ –  
  
She says, “You came back for me.”

 

* * *

 

 **VII. Altarf  
** _The darkness of your hair stretched between us like a river **  
** Bright eyes peeking out from behind your veil **  
** Today you left **  
** A strand of dark hair behind **  
** And I was bound forever_ 

 

* * *

 

_L –_

_I’ve arrived in the capital! Or, more correctly, I arrived a week ago, but that is neither here nor there. The important part is that I’m missing you terribly already, especially in light of what – or whom – I’ve ended up being saddled with._

_I’ve told you that Father does not trust the new king that has been instated. You’ve heard the rumors: younger than us in years, with true alpha eyes and absolutely no experience. Father and the rest of my clan think him only a puppet king for the Hales who are now being headed by Peter the Mad. Because of this, I have ended up at the citadel as an ambassador for our clan; more specifically, a spy, but father says that is only semantics._

_I’m sure the Hales are onto us, though, because they have saddled me with who is surely their most aggravating escort. His name is Stiles, a scribe, and apparently he is the only son of the captain of the king’s guards – the Captain Stilinski who was involved in that stronghold incident all those years ago, when his wife died from ingesting poison; do you remember? The man is quite distinguished from what I remember of him from some ceremony years ago – but mercy, his son is something else altogether; he is also the best friend to the king, and if this is not an accurate reflection of our king’s choices, then I don’t know what is._

_Case in point: Stiles is currently pounding on my door, yelling something (a riddle?) about “When is a door not a door – I need to know, Allison!” I am going to calmly ignore him until I finish writing this letter to you._

_My lovely, darling Lydia. The last thing I want to expose you to is all this “palace intrigue,” but often times, I find myself thinking that everything would somehow work itself out if only you were here with me. How have I been surviving without being graced with your ornery countenance every day? The answer is, barely. Indeed, you should be honored knowing that I regard you with almost as much reverence as Matron Cross does that cat of hers. (How is the fat monster anyway? I will be disappointed with any answer besides terrible, seeing as it was always I who snuck it corncakes when it came around to visit.)_

_You should be here! But it comforts this selfish heart of mine to think that a part of you is, at least in spirit (and in ink)._

_Yours, longingly,_

_A_

_P.S. Also, you can assure Aunt Lorraine that continuing our correspondence is perfectly safe! I’ve made it so that everyone who knows about my letters only thinks that I am writing to a friend named Elle. They don’t dare read my letters; Yannic won’t let them._

_P.P.S. Stiles just “accidentally” broke his foot through my door._

_Now he’s saying that him breaking the door was not meant to be a demonstration of the answer. The answer was ajar. Lydia, I want to come home._ **  
**

 

* * *

 

 

When Lydia opens her eyes, she is lying atop a table and her first clear thought is, _I am more than sick of waking like this._

Her second thought is, _I am more than sick_.  
  
She is bolting upright then, vision swimming and her stomach even more so. Blindly, she gropes for anything that could save the last vestiges of her decorum even as a distant part of her wonders what _is_ so bad about leaving sick over your body as long as it alleviates the pain –  
  
An empty basin is pushed under her face and Lydia’s immediate, profound sense of relief is the catalyst that expels what is mostly acrid water up out past her throat. She clutches the basin with all her strength and heaves until only air and saliva drip past her mouth. Moments later, a tin cup of water appears at the edge of her vision, which she gratefully accepts. It is only after she finishes gargling and spitting that she notices how her hair has been swept up and away from her face.  
  
Slowly, warily, she glances up.  
  
A man stands at the edge of her bed, studying her as if she is a specimen more fascinating than is often believed. He has kind eyes, a neatly trimmed beard, and an even kinder voice when he tells her, “Mistletoe injected creates some adverse side effects, including nausea. It should wear off in a few more hours at most.”  
  
In the face of her silence, he continues, “My name is Deaton, and I am a healer here in his majesty’s stronghold.” Yes, Lydia thinks distantly then. She knows who he is. Deaton, from Allison’s letters and Scott and –  
  
“Stiles will be both very relieved and disappointed,” the healer tells her, as if saying so would bring her comfort. Lydia hardly hears him past the wind whistling through her ears.  
  
No.  
  
She feels dangerously close to sick again.  
  
No, no, no.  
  
Please, no.  
  
_Stiles._  
  
“ – was dangerously close on multiple occasions of – sent him off with Scott only half an hour ago – ”  
  
_Please,_ she wants to beg the healer. _Please tell me what I remember was only from the fever. That it was all some fever dream. Oh, god,_ please.  
  
Through her haze of absolute, irrevocable horror, she sees Deaton looking at her, a small smile lifting the corners of his mouth. He says, “I’ll go retrieve him, shall I?”  
_  
_ She is too terrified to even consider his words – the meaning of them – and it is only when he disappears that she begins to shake. The faintest tremors at first, but soon enough it has become violent enough to send the world shuddering around her and she cannot sit still anymore – she cannot sit still as her sins pile up onto her shoulders, stains the ground and people around her, and _I’m sorry,_ she thinks to Allison, to herself, to her grandmother, to everyone who had been kind enough to consider her with good faith. _My god, I am so sorry. Do you see now, how much I cannot be trusted?  
_  
She slips off the table then, and does the very thing Allison had entreated her not to do. She runs.

 

* * *

  
  
It is only fitting for the heavens to give Lydia a soulmate as good at searching as she is at becoming lost.  
  
“That’s three times now.”  
  
Lydia suppresses the shudder that spreads from her shoulder blades and, when she looks back, Stiles is standing on the window ledge carved beside the staircase Lydia is descending – five stories up, calm as you please. For a single moment, Lydia is caught between unveiled fascination and the need to shout for him to _get down from there_.  
  
Instead, she tucks her shaking hands into the folds of some paltry sick-gown a healer had decided to change her into while unconscious. She takes in the unnatural stillness of his posture, replays the dangerous calm attached to the ends of his words, and considers their next steps.  
  
He sees it; of course he would. Says, “Don’t you dare.” Then he is leaping down, shoes crunching loudly on the stone tiles, and stalking over to where she is, still frozen on a step.  
  
It is this movement, if anything, that shocks her into a response, and she bolts away from him down the stairs. But desperation is not only hers and he is so much taller, has the longer legs, and so she is only perhaps five steps down when he is in front of her.  
  
“Hey, no,” he says, ducking his head to meet her eyes even as he is backing her slowly up the stairs. “You’re not allowed to,” and something flares hot in her chest then, born out of indignation and guilt and frustration. She whips her head up to glare at him, to say _can’t I, now?_ But the only sound that ends up escaping is the audible scrape of her teeth grinding together.  
  
Stiles leans back in response, his eyes absorbing seemingly every crevice of her face, and says, “What?” in a tone so casual it belies any and all semblance of genuine calm. He takes another step toward her. “What did you want to say? I know words aren’t beyond you, Mar – _Lydia_. Elle. Allison spoke so often of your conversations my ears would bleed. _You_ branded your words across my clavicle and that _literally_ won’t stop bleeding.” There is a grim quality to his tone when he says, “That much I know, at least.”  
   
Lydia is momentarily distracted by this last slip of information. She eyes his collarbone covered by the roughness of his shirt, searches for any spotting of a darker contrast, and her fingers twitch against her thigh. She wants to peel that ratty shirt back and see if he still has his array of weapons strapped underneath, even here in his own home. She wants to catalogue every bruise and cut he received because of her or otherwise. She wants to cross-index the damage done, to steal her words back, to erase his pain and take it selfishly all for herself. She _wants_.  
  
Lydia nearly laughs. Ten years of her grandmother’s warnings and a constant, willing suppression and this is what it has come to: her words burnt into his skin, wounds on both their ends, and a beating heart that is now unsatisfied with being kept solely inside her ribcage.  
  
There is truth in the proverbs, then. No matter the spin of a compass, true north cannot become south. No matter the path taken, fate is still fate. Lydia stares at the boy before her – beautiful in his anger and how could she have _ever_ thought him ordinary – and she cannot help but think, once more, that if Lorraine of Martin could not revoke fate, how much more could her granddaughter?  
  
“Say something,” Stiles says then, and she can now plainly hear what the calm was hiding – a thin, stretching thread of desperation, anger, fear. “Don’t just _look._ Yell at me. Curse. Rage. Use five thousand words, use one.” He takes in a deep breath and lets it out, slowly; the sound shakes with his voice when he says, “My god, Lydia. Anything. I want to hear your voice so badly it hurts.”  
  
This, then, is what will break her. Some forgotten, stone-forged stairwell in an iron castle, a boy with eyes the color of the sun, her blood across his chest, and her inability to ever let go – not truly. Not even when his blood stains her hands and he is beneath her, dying and whispering all in the same breath _if only_ –  
  
She is so tired. The thought flashes unbidden through her, both startling and resigned. The weight sinks within her, heavier than any stone, and she could sink along with it to the ground, her face in her hands, and cry and rage and crumble into a million unsalvageable pieces. How easy it would be to do this. How much of a _relief_.  
  
Instead, Lydia considers the words sitting and bleeding beneath her soulmate’s clothing, inches away from his heart. She looks into bright, feverish eyes and a young face, and understands in the same instant that she will never be able to let go – of him or his fate. Not when she hasn’t yet reached a conclusive number for the constellations the sun has scattered across his body, not when she knows the cost of willpower found lacking.  
  
But, in this moment, she will grant this wish of the foolish boy who had the misfortune to ever think Lydia of Martin’s words a blessing.  
  
So Lydia opens her mouth. Gifts him words neither venomous nor blaming as he had been expecting to receive; not as flustered or resigned as she feels. In the darkness, she offers him a small and still unfolding confession. One he will not fully understand until much later. “I have never meant to hurt you.”

 

* * *

* * *

 

There are flecks of her blood beneath his fingernails that Stiles still has not washed away. Scott insisted that he needed to change as he reeked of days-old blood and sweat. It wasn’t the best way to properly meet one’s soulmate, according to him.  
  
Stiles cannot think that one word without his stomach plummeting.  
  
His _soulmate_.  
  
There is not much of that day that he remembers and, as it is with all things, there is not much that he cannot. This is what he cannot: how many people he had killed getting to her, how many after. The journey home. The number of candles he burned through, waiting for her to wake. The number of times he had thought she wouldn’t. This is what he does: how loudly her screams echoed through the corridors of that dingy, abandoned manor in Eichen and the single, unhinging moment he had realized those noises as _hers_ , that she was capable of such a sound. The blood – oh _go_ _d_ , the _blood_ – as he cradled her against his chest, seeping dark and as red as her hair into his shirt and trousers, the crevices of his skin. The way she looked at him when she had said the words, chest stilling and her eyes sliding shut and so, so _glad_.  
  
Above all, he remembers having thought as Kira pushed him aside to press two fingers to the side of her neck, him stumbling, refusing to let go of that still, small hand: breathe for me – _oh god_ , give me another breath – and I will live the rest of my life ensuring that you’ll always be glad you did. I have been waiting my whole life to make you glad.  
  
“Lydia,” he begins now, and sees the near imperceptible flinch of her shoulders. She must read the curiosity unrepentant in his voice, the need to _understand_ – to understand why she didn’t tell them, why she is still running away, _why_. So he gentles his voice and says, “You should be resting.”  
  
“I can’t – have to go,” she says, finally, stumbling over her words as if they had been born from a mind too fast and a tongue too slow. A faint flush rises from her throat and he wonders in that moment what she would say if she knew: that he has half of a book dedicated to her. More red than green, more scratches than anything legible, filled with unanswered questions and foolish dreams. That he has two pages devoted solely to the sound of her voice.  
  
He wonders what she would say if she knew that he thinks he would be willing to say anything, just to hear her speak.  
  
He swallows this temptation, a stone lodged in his throat and says instead, patiently, “Lydia,” because Stiles is nothing if not impatient and yet, somehow, he has only ever been otherwise for her. “You were half- _dead_ when we found you. There was a hole the size of my _fist_ in your head. If it wasn’t for Deaton – ”  
  
If it wasn’t for Deaton, you would be dead. His vision swims for a moment, a blur of red and the hollow of her throat, and he clenches his jaw, slowly and steadily works his way through his words until he is able to say, “Besides, king’s orders,” and he watches as her eyes do not widen and, if anything, he has one red thread solved: that she has known since the beginning, the players in this game. She had known when she agreed to come with them, when she pointed out Yannic’s whereabouts without ever having heard his name, when perhaps she first dragged Stiles’ unconscious body into her living room.  
  
And even more, this: in this same, entire span of time, she had known them to be soulmates.  
  
The Stiles from only three months past would have cited anger and, perhaps more pretentiously, anguish as his primary reaction. But Stiles now finds that it is neither of these that makes its home within him, but rather fear. Fear, that wonders and wonders and never dares to reach a conclusion. Fear, that questions only _why_ – why would she have kept this from him, why she would choose to have a soulmark unreturned, such that Deaton had almost feared more for the infection than the gaping hole in her skull? Fear that lies with him even in his dreams, wondering what he has done wrong.  
  
Stiles watches her now, breath bated, waiting for the inevitable flight to appear in her large, bruised eyes – the resistance – even as she readily swallows his words.  
  
It does not come. Instead, he watches as an almost foreign light appears in its stead – and his breath is not so much bated as it is gone, because he still remembers the look in his father’s eyes when he used to look at his mother, all _Claudia, my dove_ ’s and uninitiated smiles and soft words, and Stiles remembers after her death – even now – the strange, twisted variant that would emerge in its place whenever his father was reminded of her.  
  
“I can’t,” Lydia repeats, and now he understands. It was not disuse that marked her earlier words, but hesitance.  
  
For a moment, he had seen an impossible desire reflected in her eyes.

 

* * *

  
  
_I can’t,_ she says, but Stiles had seen from the window a familiar, dark head of hair passing below them, and soon Kira is sweeping up the corridor, all sunny smiles and impossible to refuse.  
  
“I am so, so glad you’re awake,” she gushes to an increasingly distressed Lydia, who had initially looked to Stiles for help – only to have realized _who_ she was looking at, and which side he stood on – and so now Stiles watches her stare distractedly at the wall.  
  
“Scott has already set out a room for you,” Kira says. “It is right down the hall from Malia and myself! We selected it, actually. It is a really lovely view and all – you can see all the lower courtyards and even beyond the stronghold, toward the southern hills! Would you like to come see? Malia spent hours this morning decorating with her er, more eclectic tastes. Her best rodent skull collection, etcetera. It is sweet, really, considering she almost bit Liam’s hand off that one time he tried touching it. But, oh!” Here, Kira’s face rounds with concern. “Unless, of course, you cannot yet journey that far. Recovery takes importance above all. We are all here to help! Even the _mice_ know better than to allow you to be alone during this time.”  
  
Stiles has never been so afraid of Kira in his life. Lydia, for all that she is awake, looks as if she has grown catatonic again – most likely, Stiles thinks, playing that last bit over in her head, hearing the implication beneath it. And so, still lost in the hundreds of escape scenarios she is conjuring, Lydia allows Kira to lead her away; presumably, to her newly decorated quarters.  
  
“We’ll stop quickly at Deaton’s first,” he hears Kira saying as they disappear from sight. “He has missed you, I’m sure. Also, he needs to periodically check for any signs of infection.”  
  
Stiles waits until their echoing steps fade before commenting mildly, “I’m sure my soulmate neither appreciates the manhandling nor the manipulation,” and then a new figure is melting from the shadows further down the stairwell.  
  
Scott joins Stiles at the window, watching as Kira and Lydia cross the outside terrace. Stiles does not startle; the king was, after all, the head of hair he had seen earlier. After a long silence, Scott asks, “And you?”  
  
Stiles heaves a shoulder in some poor semblance of a shrug, says, “Definitely not the manhandling part, but the manipulation I suppose I can objectively appreciate, as a fellow dabbler in the arts.”  
  
A faint, tired laugh escapes his friend. “I thought so,” Scott says, and Stiles wants to ask, unrepentantly serious, _what else have you thought? What else do you know? What do you know, that I cannot yet see?  
_  
Scott cuts him off as he is opening his mouth. “Before you start,” he says, “I don’t know either, just because I’m a king or a werewolf. In fact, I think I’m at more of a loss than you. You were always the one who figured things out.”  
  
Stiles says with sudden affect, “Oh, right. _That’s_ what I was forgetting to tell you, Your Highness: conceited is waiting for you in the throne room. It wants its crown back.” At his friend’s groan, he only huffs out, “I was never going to ask you because you were a _king_ or a _werewolf_. Not solely,” he is quick to defend at Scott’s incredulous stare. “Just as a friend,” and Stiles shrugs, not as casually as he would have liked. As a friend. As a friend who has a soulmate.  
  
Who _has_ _had_. The thought wells up in him, sick and terrifying all at once, and he clears his throat, says, “Am I completely hideous and no one has been telling me all these years? ‘Moderately tolerable,’ Malia even said to me that one time. I’m feeling extremely betrayed.”  
  
Scott rolls his eyes but his words are solemn, a heavy balm of sincerity only an alpha can instill. “It’s nothing about _you_ , Stiles. Have you seen the way she looks at you?” and Stiles would very much like to say with innocence, _what way?_ But how can he, when he had caught glimpse of it not even a quarter of an hour past. It is not a sight one can effectively pretend they have never seen, but if anything, it only unsettles him further because what need would she have to look at him this way while running in the other direction?

 

* * *

* * *

  
  
The view from Lydia’s stone balcony is lovely indeed. From here, she can see that there are exactly three wards– the uppermost one lying directly below her – the other two lower in latitude, overseeing the capital city that is stationed at the foot of the hills. There is also, she sees, guards stationed neatly in every visible crenel of the walls and she sighs.  
  
Kira perches on the ledge, clearly unafraid of either heights or death by heights. “My room is over there,” she says, pointing to an open window three balconies to the left. “Malia’s is directly across the corridor from mine. Originally, we had wanted you closer, but apparently some diplomats from Fairvale are visiting.” Her nose wrinkles and she lowers her voice, says, “If you ask me, they’ve been eying our eastern regions for more than just the silver mines.”  
  
For a long while, Lydia only stares at Kira’s curtains, sheer and loosened by the wind. A part of her wonders instinctively which balcony would have been Allison’s, which room. If she were to walk in there now, would it still smell like magnolias? Would she be able to see the world as Allison did?  
  
Lydia chest tightens, and it takes her a good moment to figure that it is because she has forgotten to exhale. She does so slowly, turning to Kira and saying, at length, “Should you be telling me this?”  
  
Kira has been studying the clouds and she drops her head down to look at Lydia, says with a genuine amount of surprise, “What do you mean?”  
  
“I’m not to be trusted,” Lydia says, and Kira’s brow furrows as she replies, “Why not?”  
  
Lydia only smiles at her and points below them, to where there are four guards stationed, bodies tilted toward them. Then, toward the open doorway where two more are stationed outside of it.  
  
The ends of Kira’s mouth turn sheepish. “Oh,” she says, and the heels of her feet bump against the stone as she kicks her legs. “That. It’s not that Scott – or any of us – doesn’t trust you! We _do._ I promise, Lydia. It’s just – standard protocol.”  
  
_Because there are those here who don’t,_ is what Kira does not say, but Lydia hears it just as loudly. She glances down at the guards stationed in the courtyard below and considers the consequences of a king – great in power, but still young – who welcomes – even _trusts_ , if Kira’s words are to be believed –  the company of a harbinger of calamity, of _death_.  
  
She wonders if the consequences will be anything like those of a soulmate’s – and then, riding on the coattails, comes a startling thought: what person, indeed, would welcome and trust a harbinger of death as a soulmate?  
  
Kira’s voice cuts through this rather astonishing consideration. “Also because you are still very injured and, er. Well – ”  
  
“Because you like to run, and the only one among us who will be awake enough most hours of the day to catch you is a human boy who cannot even outrun a _bee_.” Both girls look up to see Malia standing in the doorframe, cradling an armful of glossed shells. As she steps inside, another, smaller figure follows at a more sedated pace, carrying a silver tray of tea and biscuits.  
  
“Found her waiting outside the door,” Malia says.  
  
The maid curtsies, her eyes on the floor, and says, “Lady Yukimura, your tea,” her words accompanied by a thin, faint rattling. It takes Lydia a moment to realize that the sound is coming from the tray.  
  
Ah, she thinks then as she catches sight of trembling hands and when she lifts her eyes, the maid’s returning stare jerks away in unadulterated terror and Lydia wonders if the girl’s grandmother ever whispered to her tales about the dangers of looking into a witch’s eyes.  
  
Terror bleeds white into the girl’s knuckles and Kira is quick to snatch the tray away as the rattling augments, says graciously, “Thank you, Sydney. You may take your leave.”  
  
The girl forgets to curtsy and Lydia waits until she has disappeared before saying, quietly, “I think I should be moved somewhere safer.” _To your witch tower,_ she doesn’t say. Someplace where my presence won’t frighten the occupants and their loyalties away from their king.  
  
“You don’t feel safe?” Malia asks in the same moment Kira says, firmly, “No, Lydia. You’re staying here with us.”  
  
“Yes,” Malia agrees, and smiles such that all her teeth flash white and sharp. “Don’t be afraid. I live only three doors away.”  
  
Lydia cannot help the warmth that blooms within her chest, does not think anyone could ever be afraid with Malia of Tate around.

 

* * *

  
  
Malia loves the sea. She has been four times, it being only a two days’ journey away from the capital, and she cajoles Kira and Lydia into taking another trip before winter comes. Her collection of shells is equally as impressive as her rodent skulls – a collection Lydia very politely returns to her, save for that of a particularly small field vole which she displays on top of her dresser because, mercy, the girl’s eyes turn _very blue_ when disappointed.  
  
The three of them are sitting on the small drawing room couch, halfway through a plate of assorted biscuits when, in the middle of a discussion on the merits of differently colored shells for interior decorating, there is a muted knock against the door.  
  
A shorter boy stands in the doorway, scowling at them; the least bit unafraid, Lydia notices. “Hi,” he says, shoulders slouching terribly.  
  
“Liam!” Kira says brightly and Malia lobs a confectionary across the room at his face – also, at a very dangerous speed – which the boy catches easily in one hand. “Hi. What are you doing here? Can he come in?” This last question is directed at Lydia, who nods.  
  
The boy sidles warily into the room, managing to look both shy and mutinous all at once – an incredible feat, giving that his mouth is also now full of iced currant cookie. He grows shier, still, when he catches Lydia staring his way, and she is reminded of Allison, of her saying, _like Scott but with Stiles’ temper_.  
  
“Uhh, well I only – oh. No thanks,” he says, when Kira offers him a seat on a cushion. “Listen, Scott wanted me to um, notify you of a red meeting he’s called in a quarter till. Now that we’re all awake.” He shrugs, directs his attention to Malia and gestures to his mouth, saying, “Hey, s’good. Is there another?”  
  
“I know it’s good,” Malia replies, grinning. “That’s why I made sure to eat the rest.”  
  
Liam shrugs again. “Oh. Well th – _hey!_ ” because in that moment, Malia has carefully placed another of the same cookie inside her mouth.  
  
Lydia has never truly appreciated the gracefulness with which Kira ignores situations she does not care to endorse. As Malia and Liam begin wrestling in the seat beside her, Kira takes measured sips from her teacup – an incredible feat, given that the couch has since turned into a turbulent sea – and offers Lydia one of the iced currant cookies from Malia’s now unguarded stash before taking one for herself. It is only when both she and Lydia have finished that she stands, says to no one in particular, “I didn’t think it was _that_ good.”  
  
Malia and Liam both stare up at her in outrage. “You should see Deaton,” Malia finally suggests kindly, to which Kira replies, just as sweet, “I will, when we go to the war room. Which we are now late for.” This sends the other two scrambling onto their feet, hurriedly brushing crumbs from their clothes, and as they head for the door, it is Liam who looks back at Lydia, stilling mid-step, as if there is something inherently baffling about what he sees.  
  
“Er,” the boy says then, “including you.” There is a strange, stilted end to his words, as if the boy had intended to address Lydia as _mistress_ or _lady_ , only to forgo both at the last instant. He looks helplessly at Kira who is, undoubtedly, the most likely person in this room to take pity on him.  
  
Kira does not disappoint. “Including _you_ ,” she repeats to Lydia with a brilliant smile and tugs her up and out of the room behind the others.

 

* * *

  
  
A red meeting, as Kira explains, is analogous to an emergency meeting, sans the council of elders. “Only pack,” Kira says, and Lydia, alarmed, wants to remind Kira that _she_ is _not_ ‘pack,’ but then Malia is interrupting, saying that if you ask her, a red meeting is just a normal pack meeting but inside a fancier hall. Liam rolls his eyes, in turn calls the entire code system _stupid and unnecessary_ which rouses considerable debate from both Kira and Malia and then, before Lydia can realize it, they have arrived.  
  
The war room is extravagant, embellished in marble that gleams from the expansive ceiling to the floor. A mural of what seems to be the history of their kingdom unscrolls across the ceiling and Lydia cannot help but be awed – in all her years, she has never seen a single room that carries with it such a tremendous presence.  
  
In the center is a long, marbled table, spanning perhaps the entire distance of Lydia’s bedroom, and Scott, Stiles, and Deaton already stand at one end, voices echoing as they converse amongst themselves.  
  
“Glad you could make it,” Scott calls as they near and adds, “Thank you, Liam.” He claps a hand on the boy’s shoulder when he is close enough. Liam goes pleasantly pink, mutters incomprehensibly.  
  
“What took you so long,” Stiles is saying then, pushing away from the table – “Misers, that’s what,” Liam says loud enough to be understood, and Malia grins – but he only has eyes for Lydia. Lydia, who fails twice at meeting them and so stares instead, bewildered, at the inscriptions lining the edge of the table, wondering _what is wrong with her?_  
  
“You all right?” Stiles asks her, close enough that his voice does not echo, and Lydia purses her lips to a side. Nods. My god, she thinks again. What is _wrong_ with me?  
  
Scott’s voice rises from behind them like the swelling of a tide. “If everyone would have a seat, we can begin.” A pointed pause. Then, “The faster you sit, the faster you see Hayden” – a bargain that seems oddly specific, and Lydia glances up in time to see Liam seat himself fast enough to blur. His soulmate, then; the girl who would kick him in the shins, and Lydia does not even realize she is smiling until they are all seated and Kira, who is next to her, whispers, “What’s so funny?”  
  
From where he is seated beside Scott, Deaton opens the meeting by saying, “I’ve had some time to study each of your conditions since your return, and while I have never personally witnessed this method of chimerical infection through inoculation, I would argue that it is more than a flesh wound inflicted through supernatural means. Rather, it would be more comparable to that of a supernatural wound inflicted through physical means.”  
  
“Like wolfsbane poisoning?” Stiles says, and Deaton concedes, saying, “That would be the closest parallel I can think of, yes. Similarly, as it would be with wolfsbane poisoning, this effect can only be reversed with one of two methods. One – incision – which I have already tried during your physical, with minimal success.”  
  
Scott leans forward, forearms resting against the table, and says, “Then we’re saddled with the remaining option. The locating and burning of the parent cluster.”  
  
“Your Majesty is correct.”  
  
Then it is Malia who is leaning forward, saying, “Meaning we’ll have to destroy the Dread Doctors.”  
  
“More or less,” Deaton agrees.  
  
“More, then,” Stiles says. “Convenient, considering we’ve already made this an imperative for how long, now?” and Deaton replies, “Convenient, yes. Easy, no. Judging by how long it has been since you’ve made it an imperative.”  
  
A surprised bark of laughter escapes from Scott. Stiles only lifts his gaze heavenward, says, “It brings me great comfort to know you haven’t yet lost that sense of humor to old age.”  
  
“It will be among the last of my traits to go,” Deaton assures, smiles modestly as his words are met with thunderous hooting – at least by Liam and Scott. Malia, now slumped with her chin rested atop the table, rolls her eyes violently enough that Lydia fears for any permanent damage and, a split moment later, Liam – the closest of the three boys to her – is yelping in indignation and grabbing at his leg.  
  
“Ah,” Deaton says, and looks knowing Malia’s way. “Shall we continue?”  
  
He tells them that, while it is true supernatural creatures cannot be changed into chimeras, the Doctors are still able to augment one’s abilities until it becomes uncontrollable. “This would explain your” – and here, Deaton looks at Scott, Kira, Malia, and Liam – “involuntary shifts into a more powerful medium, especially during lunar tide. As for Stiles, it seems that the airborne method was not invasive enough to convert him, especially since he is also under Scott’s proverbial umbrella, and would only have affected any part of him touched previously by the supernatural; that is, unfortunately, the nogitsune.”  
  
“Furthermore,” he says, “if we are to assume that you all received the same dosage, this unstable increase in ability would also explain why Scott was paradoxically the least affected among the pack. Alpha status – particularly, I would assume, that of a true alpha – seems to provide a mental buffer of some sort – a protection he then extended upon locating each of you.”  
  
“Such that we were able to regain consciousness during the day,” Kira adds.  
  
Liam abruptly looks up from where he has been massaging his shins, as abruptly as if he has been clocked in the head. “If we manage to kill the Dread Doctors, does this mean Mason will also be saved?” he asks, and the hesitant, hopeful catch in his voice has Lydia holding her breath, looking at Deaton as they all are now – a silent, pleading bid to preserve the light in the young boy’s eyes.  
  
Deaton, who is so kind and gentle when he says, “Mason is like Theo and his pack, in that they have all received a surgical transplantation by the Doctors. The death of the Doctors will not mean anything to any of them.”  
  
“Then – ” the light has extinguished, has been replaced by disbelief and a steady, red flushing to his ears and neck. “Then how will we save him? We _have_ to save him. We should be out there, right now, _searching_ – who knows what they could be doing to him,” and his eyes catch fleeting on Lydia’s before looking away, a guilty, panicked furrow to his brows, and Lydia knows that he cannot help but entertain the possibility of the Doctors doing to Mason what Valack did to her.  
  
Deaton says, “As long as we find and eliminate the Doctors in time, Mason will remain latent. From there, I will do everything in my power to safely remove whatever it is they’ve planted within him, Liam. But as it is now, our first priority is to temporarily suppress this curse of yours or we will never stand a chance against either the Doctors or Theo and his pack. Remember, the Doctors only ever operate under the cover of night.”  
  
Malia, who has been watching as Liam’s face had turned red then green and finally, now, a pale, sallow white, reaches out and places one hand on his shoulder, and he shifts into it. “We’ll kill them all,” she declares, blunt and merciless with all the charm of a vengeful sibling, and a tremulous smile lifts the corners of Liam’s mouth.  
  
Stiles adds from across the table, “Speaking of Theo and his pack, can we kill him too, along the way?” and Liam agrees, saying, “I don’t want any of them coming back for Hayden.”  
  
But, “Theo is not a priority now,” Scott decides. “Right now, it is to find a temporary cure for our curse and to stop the Dread Doctors before they finish whatever they’re planning to do with Mason.”  
  
“What do you want us to do?” Kira says then, and Scott flashes her a grateful smile, says, “Well, Deaton will be – ”  
  
“Researching,” Deaton supplies.  
  
“ – Right. We’ll help where we can. Oh, and also – we will have to continue spending our nights in the dungeons,” a comment met with a chorus of heartfelt groans from around the table. Scott frowns, says, “You know we have to take the necessary precautions. It’s our duty.”  
  
“But wolfsbane _itches_ ,” Liam complains, and Stiles says, “Well, that’s kind of the point,” which prompts the other boy to send a very rude gesture his way.  
  
Kira leans back in her chair, crosses her arms and sighs, loose strands of hair fluttering at the movement. “So we’ll essentially be useless come nightfall.”  
  
“Deaton, you better get to work then,” Malia says. “But before that, could you please take a look at Kira. Liam and I think there is something wrong with her sense of taste.”

 

* * *

  
  
“Were you incredibly bored?” Stiles asks Lydia afterward, when they are heading out the room. The instant Scott had called the meeting to an end, Liam had sprinted straight for the large, gilded doors. Scott had shaken his head, said, “To be young again,” and Stiles had pointed out, “You’re barely three years older.” Lydia, standing close enough, had heard the distant, bittersweet undercurrent in the king’s tone and understood that he was not referring to youth in terms of years.  
  
Lydia shakes her head at Stiles now. _The meeting was interesting,_ she wants to say, but the truth is that, as surely as Liam had felt racing out that door, Lydia would have found even the dreariest of situations exhilarating, just to be near her soulmate.  
  
“Well, _I_ was, especially those last fifteen minutes when Deaton began sharing his zeal for medical terminology again.” Stiles says this affably enough, but peering up, Lydia can see the tightness beneath his eyes and she knows that he had hung on to every last word.  
  
A drop of amusement spreads through her and _oh,_ she is tempted to tease him – to ask, well, who had been the one drilling Deaton to begin with? Who had extended the meeting time by nearly a quarter of an hour?  
  
Because despite that carefully crafted disinterest, Lydia knows that, besides Scott, there is perhaps no one else who is more susceptible to caring. This is, she thinks, one red string pulled and gone, and she allows herself a small smile. It is in that same instant that Stiles glances down at her and suddenly the quiet cheer she feels is snuffed like a flame – suffocated by that same, overwhelming feeling that had crashed over her earlier.  
  
 She has never been so grateful to hear the others approaching from behind.  
  
Deaton says, “Mistress Lydia, I’ll need to check on your head wound at your nearest convenience,” and then Kira is addressing the two guards waiting outside the doors, saying, “I’ll be going with her; you have permission to leave,” only for one of the guards to reply, “I apologize, Lady Yukimura, but the elder Fristoe has forbidden us from allowing the oracle to leave our sights – ”  
  
“All right, but who is more frightening do you think – Elder Fristoe who hasn’t had a bowel movement in thirty years thanks to the stick inserted in his ass or my dad who is familiar with an equally long stick but is also willing to remove it so he can beat you into oblivion with said feces-covered stick?”  
  
Apparently, the correct answer is Stiles’ father.  
  
Lydia thinks that the two guards, who leave very quickly after that, were not the only ones traumatized by the image created. This is the only explanation she is willing to entertain for why it isn’t until much later that she realizes the reason for the cloying sensation coursing through her whenever she had looked – or, more accurately, had been _unable_ to directly look – at Stiles.

 

* * *

 

 **VIII. Regulus  
** _The summer hounds run at your heels, barking joyously_  
_Your responding delight overwhelms me as_ _fire razes the lands_  
_And the sounds of your harp and lyre reaches even into the darkest corners of night_  
_But your eyes remain ever-gentle as they find mine_  
_And I will not be rendered shy_

 

* * *

  
  
When Lydia comes awake screaming from her tenth nightmare the first night in her quarters, some unwilling part of her realizes that even if she didn’t have six guards stationed permanently outside every possible escape route, she still won’t be able to leave. There is a hurt within her that Deaton, for all his knowledge of wounds, cannot treat.  
  
The first few days she spends in her room, lying on her bed, watching the light slip slowly across her ceiling. The first few days, she allows herself to cry and shudder, to dwell on the ghosting of hands prodding gently around her skull, to burrow herself into her covers for hours on end. The first few days, she allows herself to sink, sink, alone – in a way she hadn’t since that day nearly a year ago, a bitter and cloying taste on the back of her tongue until she cannot do anything but remember how each breath should be followed by another.  
  
It is on the fifth day that she opens the front door for herself and is greeted not with stoic-faced guards, but with a cloth-covered tray that has been placed on the floor. In the safety of her bedroom, she discovers a plate of soft biscuits covered with gravy, a saucer of berries and cream, a pitcher of water, a bundle of dried wildflowers, and a small stack of notes.  
  
_Lydia,_ the first one reads in large, loopy cursive, _I finally convinced Matron Fleming (she’s our cook) to make a batch of her famous biscuits again! They are even better than the ones we had near Reyes, that one time. I managed to rescue a few for you before the others devoured them all. Stiles once inhaled five in one breath, it was ghastly. We think that is partly why Matron Fleming refused to bake them for so long. But alas, I always do tend to ramble on too much. I hope you enjoy!  –K_  
  
_Hi Lydia, I ~~drei~~ dried the flowers for you becouse Stiles dosen’t know how to do  anything. The sun is realy hot today. Lets go to the oshen, soon. – Malia_ _  
_  
_Good morrow, Lydia: I’m sorry for not informing you about the guards earlier. I’ve since been able to remove them with the help of Stiles – you’ll find it shocking how easily he can yell at the elderly_ _– and you are free to wander wherever you please. Liam accidentally broke a stacked pile of plates yesterday, stealing cookies from the kitchens, and so today’s meal is, in part, made from his sweat and tears. He would also like me to inform you that the soup took him four hours to make, which makes me wonder. Please enjoy (with a considerable amount of caution)! Sincerely yours, Scott and_ – written larger and considerably more crookedly – _Liam_  
  
Then, written in a script so familiar she knows it better than her own: _Don’t kill me, but saw these on my way back from the city and thought of you. If it helps, I was shat on twice by birds today. Kira says it is an omen of good luck, but I saw her secretly laughing so forgive me for not believing her._  
  
And the bottommost note, in that same handwriting: _Lydia – we’ll be here._  
  
Lydia runs her hands over the indents of each parchment and, for the first time in days that have melded into one another with the early autumn heat, allows a small wave of warmth to wash over her. Bit by bit, she samples each of the items on the tray and marvels at two things: one, how Allison could have _ever_ chosen to willingly eat Lydia’s seabiscuits in the company of such dishes and, two, how the feeling of warmth does not dissipate as she is thinking this but, strangely, blooms all the more.

 

* * *

  
  
Later, she will look into the mirror placed over her dressing table and examine the closely shorn hair around her left temple, the splotch of mistletoe pasted dark and green against her skin. She will study this sallow, wan version of herself – the bruises on her collarbone, her cheeks, the small gashes lining the corners of her mouth - the words on her hip that are slowly beginning to heal – and she will find herself thinking that if Valack did not break her when he had the chance, she will make certain he does not begin to now.

 

* * *

  
  
That fifth night, she falls asleep to the sound of early autumn rain and dreams of being back home, the smell of ginger tea wafting through the thin walls, Allison’s and grandmother’s voices drifting alongside it – but when Lydia nears the kitchen door, their timbres change – splits, multiples, deepens and heightens on every side – and when she enters, it is not only grandmother and Allison, but Scott, Stiles, Kira, Malia, Liam, all crowded around that familiar, wooden table. _Sleepyhead,_ Allison teases her, _look who came,_ and grandmother is smiling and extending a hand to her, saying, _Mercy, this table is growing too small but I think we have room for one more_ , and an uninhibited sense of astonishment and joy wells up within Lydia –  
  
– but when she touches her grandmother’s hand, where soft skin should be is a dark, leather glove, and when Lydia looks up, it is Valack’s face that looms above her. _I’m so glad you could join us,_ he says, and she realizes with sickening horror that, behind him, grandmother, Allison, Scott, Stiles, Kira, Malia, Liam are still crowded around the table but the scent of ginger is gone and there are now gaping red holes where their eye sockets are supposed to be and Allison’s mouth opens and says, _join us Lydia, we have room for one more –  
_  
A laugh rips through the air, modest and dissonant, and Lydia turns to see Theo smiling so wide the corners of his mouth _physically reach_ his eyes and there is not one inch of him that is not covered with blood and he is saying to her, _I did it, do you see, success, success –_  
  
 – and then, again, the familiar fractures of her vision: that terrifying, helpless rush of death, panic, screams – of someone’s blood scraped raw beneath her hands – except now Theo is in the background, his voice chanting louder still, _I did it, I did it – I killed them all –_ _success, success_ –  
  
  
Lydia jolts awake to the last remaining echoes of her scream. Condensation curves, cold and real, down her throat and a part of her is abruptly, irrationally glad that neither Kira nor Malia is around tonight to have heard her. The larger part of her, however, is staring at the butterflies stitched into her quilt, replaying what she had just seen.  
  
In her mind, she stitches the pieces together to understand what it means, because there are dreams, and then there are visions. The first covers you like an early morning fog, but the second will weigh deep inside your bones.  
  
This one is as heavy as they come.

 

* * *

  
  
It isn’t that Lydia does not have a plan or does not _want_ one – that she is some sadomasochist intent on prolonging the suffering of both her and everyone else her misery can reach. But any plan she ever formulates is tremulous at best, as it always is with the proverbial crumbs the heavens may toss your way.  
  
These are her crumbs then, that Lydia spreads out in front of her until she memorizes the shape and size of each one. First, that in a very possible future, she will hold her soulmate as he dies of wounds and regrets. Second, that there is a war brewing on the horizon, dark and frothing and larger than the sum of its parts. Third, that the chimera Theo is not satisfied with being written into the background of this narrative, that he demands a role as prominent as the king’s – that, perhaps even, he demands the role _of_ the king. Fourth, that the third is inexplicably linked to the first and second.  
  
Inexplicably linked, she thinks, in red. Her thumb brushes instinctively across the writing, raised and still tender, across her hip. “Red is for unsolved,” she whispers aloud, and her mouth curves into a smile, the words as brave and curious on her tongue as they had been countless years ago when her younger self had first read them aloud beneath the covers of her quilts; words once private and only for her now bared for the rest of the world to see.  
  
So, in the weeks to come, this is what Lydia does: she borrows a map – or five – from the library, ink and pen from the war room, sheaves of parchment from the lecture hall. A set of knives is reported missing from the kitchens but this news never travels any higher than the chambermaids, who may or may not see a similar set lying within the oracle’s chambers.  
  
Lydia wraps herself in dark shawls and sketches the changing of constellations from the highest perch. On rainy days, she is lost within the tomes scattered in forgotten corners of Deaton’s infirmary. On sunnier ones, she storms into the stables and demands a horse – she is given a small, sturdy creature by a hand whose complexion grows paler with every visit. Lydia recommends him watercress. She then treks into the brambles and thickets beyond the castle, the meadows and stretches of empty space. The maids do not restock the meeting hall inkwells anymore out of mutiny, so Lydia has taken to salvaging half-dried counterparts from forgotten guest chambers. The tip of her tongue is now black.  
  
When she returns in the late afternoon, shoes and makeshift trousers muddy, her bag is bursting with empty inkwells, dripping parchment, samples of mint and dandelion roots, wolfsbane and dog’s cole. The wildflowers she holds.  
  
“Stay still,” she orders Kira and Malia, and weaves stalks of wild verbena, meadowfoam, sprigs of blue sage and queen’s lace into their hair, tucks larkspur behind their ears. The rest of the bouquets find themselves in small, homely nooks of the kitchens and meeting hall, hung as garlands in the library and bedrooms. The stable hand discovers a modest bouquet of watercress left in the saddle.  
  
And every night, Lydia watches that one vision grow clearer.

 

* * *

  
**Naturalis Historia  
_MERCURIALIS PERENNIS  
_**_The medicinal properties of_ Mercurialis perennis, _colloquially known as dog’s mercury or dog’s cole, have traditionally been considered obsolete and, indeed, are judged to be poisonous to the common man. The perennial plant is often mistaken for_ Chenopodium bonus-henricus _or the common goosefoot mercury (see also: markry) and when eaten, has been reported to cause such symptoms as fever, vomiting, diarrhea, inflammation and, in rare cases, death. As a poison,_ M. perennis _pales in comparison to its more potent cousins such as hemlock and belladonna. It is only when considered as a ward does the plant show its true potential and, even then, it is often thrown aside in favor of the more popular mountain ash and wolfsbane. Indeed, the niche of_ M. perennis _may be too small to prove useful in everyday encounters with the supernatural, but there has been the occasional report of its efficacy when faced with chimeras. It is fitting, once considered: chimeras, creatures neither man nor beast, cannot be affected by the poisons of the humans or the supernatural – but rather by a poor man’s substitution of both._

 

* * *

  
  
Two weeks later has Lydia falling asleep outside the holding rooms, Deaton’s copy of _Naturalis Historia_ sprawled across her lap like one of the well-fed cats that meander the kitchens. Distantly, she can hear the trickling of a rainfall, although none of its downdraft reaches her. The stonewall is almost euphorically cool against her backside in this heat and she turns her head to rest one cheek on the tiles, hair damp and sticking to her neck. Four days ago, Lydia’s vision had cleared enough for her to catch a glimpse beyond bloody hands and jostling shoulders, to see that the ground below her is neither stone nor dirt, but grass, dotted with petals red and white. She had spent the subsequent days searching in maps and on foot, barely returning by nightfall to watch over Kira and Malia’s transformations.  
  
That is another growing concern: the transformations. It now takes both Deaton and Stiles to wrangle Scott. In only a few days, a certain breed of hostility has emerged within him, bleeding into his eyes and mannerisms even when it is the sun that reigns. It has grown harder to convince him – _convince,_ when it had been Scott who had initially enforced this arrangement – to step into the ash circle, to allow the silver manacles to be placed over his wrists and ankles.  
  
“No soulmate to anchor him, no relief in sight,” Deaton explains to Stiles and Lydia. “And not only him. He is equally affected by the others – Kira, Malia, Liam, and their inability to regulate their bestial forms as efficiently. It is wearing at his defenses, something that trickles down to his pack. In essence, it is what you would expect from a vicious cycle.”  
  
This causes Stiles to grit his teeth, his jaw tightening in what Lydia has come to recognize as anger. But he too is also a part of Scott’s pack, whether he physically transforms or not, and this instability affects him no less. He retreats further into his head and theories; sleeps less, panics more, until Deaton’s brews reinforce nothing but wishful thinking.  
  
Stiles does not call Theo by name anymore. It has become either ‘he,’ ‘him,’ or ‘that one,’ as if remembering the chimera has a blessed name is physically nauseating. “Let him wait,” Stiles says, once. “Every second he does, I have five more ways to watch the life bleed from his eyes,” and Lydia looks at the bruises mottling the expanse beneath his own eyes and thinks that, at this rate, he is going to have to get in line.  
  
It is this savage determination for judgment that propels her now when all other emotions seem to have dried up with the heat, and it causes Lydia to feel as though she is almost _welcoming_ the dream that would have sent her crawling not even a fortnight past.  
  
Something cool and dry presses against the condensation on her forehead. “Lydia,” someone says. “Lyd.”  
  
Lydia opens her eyes to see Stiles crouching in front of her. He is framed against the torchlight, wearing another of his thick, woolen shirts, and she feels herself wilting further just _looking_ at him – _my god_ , she thinks irritably, what is _wrong_ with him. She does not understand why he isn’t even flushed.  
  
She must ask this aloud, because Stiles says, “You’ve been running a fever.”  
  
When she stares, uncomprehending, he reaches out to brush his thumb over her cheek and only now does she feel how hot her skin is in relation to his. “See?” he murmurs, watching her carefully. “Your wound hasn’t been opening again, has it? Deaton said to visit him if that happened.”  
  
“No, not that,” she says, even as her mind is whirling with all the possibilities because she does not remember the sensation of warm liquid trickling down her temple, or anything other – oh, but then she _does_ – cole-stained gloves, dark green seeping beneath her fingernails. Lydia lets loose a sigh of irritation, sending a limp strand of hair fluttering as she does so, and then Stiles is grasping her hand and hoisting her up onto her feet.   
  
“Come on,” he says to her. “Deaton.”

 

* * *

  
  
“I’m not ill,” Lydia argues, as she is forcefully led into Deaton’s quarters. “And even if I was, the fact that I am already sweating should mean something to you.”  
  
Deaton looks up from his papers, says, “Hello. What can I do for the two of you?”  
  
“She – Lydia – has a fever,” Stiles says shortly.  
  
Deaton glances cursorily over Lydia’s complexion and a thoughtful, indulgent look passes over his own, but he only says, “Is that so? Come sit on this bed, Mistress Lydia. We’ll take a look at you.”  
  
The healer pulls down on her lower eyelids, checks her tongue and throat, the pulse on the inner side of her wrist, Stiles hovering all the while. “She’s sweating,” the boy fills into Deaton’s relative silence. “That’s a good sign, right?”  
  
“Yes,” Deaton replies. But there is a thoughtful look on his face that Lydia watches Stiles fastens upon quicker than lightning.  
  
“What?” he asks, sharp, and this is when the healer glances dubiously at Lydia. He looks at her as he had that first time she met him – as if she is a creature whose plain-in-sight attributes most others cannot see – and Lydia feels her disquiet slowly melt into horror. _He knows,_ she thinks with panicked certainty, in the same instant that she wonders, _how much does he know?_  
  
“Deaton,” Stiles demands then, and Deaton’s only words are, “It is – interesting.”  
  
“ _What_ is?”  
  
Deaton answers, slowly, “She shows signs of poisoning,” and then it is not annoyance that catches in Stiles’ throat when he says, “My God.” It is a plea.  
  
“No,” he says, turning – slowly, as if it hurts him – to look at Lydia. “No,” he repeats, and she will live the rest of her life remembering that look on his face.  
  
His mother, she recalls belatedly, numbly, from Allison’s letters. His mother had weakened gradually then, in the end, suddenly and violently, the only witness her ten-year-old son. The coroners had ruled the cause as poison from ingesting. But poison from ingesting, and not absorption.  
  
Lydia shakes her head and moves to sit upright. “Stiles,” she begins.  
  
His eyes are wide, the dark centers swallowing all and any surrounding color. The hands gripping the iron bars of the bed clench white before he haltingly, painfully lets go. There is an unnatural stillness to him that has Lydia searching his face before she realizes it is because _he isn’t breathing_. Fear blooms within her chest, hot and reckless.  
  
“Stiles,” she says, her voice rising.  
  
“Stiles,” Deaton warns.  
  
Stiles gasps. “ _How,_ ” he is choking out, staring at the older man.  
  
“Stiles, listen to me,” Deaton is saying, unreasonably calm enough that Lydia could scream. “Lydia is _fine_ – ” but Stiles does not – _cannot_ – hear him.  
  
He is straightening then, backing away, and he stumbles his way into the nearest small alcove, sits against the wall with his face between his knees, hands fisted into his hair. Lydia follows him in, the back of her thighs warm and sticky from where the bedsheets had peeled away, her entire body reduced to a single heartbeat that stutters in her throat. She shuts the door and kneels on the floor in front of him. Her hands reach out to skim his hair, his knuckles, the unyielding tendons that outline his arms.  
  
“Stiles,” she says, “shh, Stiles. Look at me. Shhh.”  
  
Gently, she coaxes his face upward until he is looking at her. His eyes are lighter than she has ever seen, the color of pale summer wheat. He stares as if he is gazing past her and into her all at once, as if he is memorizing all that he cannot have. “No, can’t,” he says – _begs_ – then, and Lydia’s heart is fracturing into a hundred small, sharp splinters, “can’t do this again – please, _God_ – “  
  
Lydia closes the distance between them, as easily as breathing. His mouth is slightly parted and his breath is warm against hers, sweet and strange and just a little wet – foreign enough to almost have her pulling away. But Lydia will impart in him a secret: that she wants to, if nothing else, ensure that he will always breathe – that he will always remember _how_ to breathe. That she cannot help but love him, a little too much for either of their own good.  
  
When she pulls back, there is a soft warmth that sticks to the inside her mouth and throat, that fills up the air in her lungs, and it is as if she has somehow managed to swallow a bit of sunlight. She is close enough to count each of his individual lashes and she thinks that she would like to stay this close forever.  
  
Stiles, she notes with palpable relief, has resumed breathing and, perhaps because he is breathing, the world once again resumes its movement, and Lydia feels as her herculean push of bravado is washed away with the tide. In its place comes embarrassment and hesitation in equal parts, and the silence between them has stretched on too long and Lydia thinks her skin will burst from both heat and dread, is abruptly terrified of all the possibilities that can leave his mouth, and so she directs her words to her lap, scolding, “Now I’ve gone and done an extremely senseless thing,” unwilling to hear how her voice shakes. “I’ve – ” _  
_  
“Kissed me,” Stiles finishes, then. There is a lost way in which he says it that has Lydia glancing up and –  
  
_Don’t stare at me like that_ , she thinks wildly. _Don’t look at me like you understand._  
  
“I’ve – yes,” is what she says, at length. Her fingers twist helplessly in her lap. “I suppose I have. But, importantly – ”  
  
“It wasn’t senseless.”  
  
“Well, it helped to ease your attack,” she allows after a moment’s pause. “But – ”  
  
“It wasn’t senseless or stupid,” he repeats, and his eyes search hers. God, they are so _bright_. “You saved my life.”  
  
_No no no_ , she thinks. _Help. Don’t say that. Not when I can hardly stand under the weight of knowing as it is._  
  
“No,” she says, aloud. The word is sharp, harsh in her need to clarify. “Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t. I haven’t.” _I won’t._ “Deaton should look at you.”  
  
“Deaton should look at _you_ ,” Stiles says, and his eyes are wide and haunted again. “Lydia, you’re _poisoned._ ”  
  
Lydia stands and the perspiration clinging to the back of her neck sighs with the movement. “So I am,” she says. “But it will pass. I was careless.”

 

* * *

* * *

  
  
Deaton is waiting for them outside the alcove, says, “Feeling better?” and Stiles grits his teeth in response. The knowing, near microscopic smile lifting the edges of the other man’s mouth does not help.  
  
Before Lydia can open her mouth and say something frankly irrelevant like _can you look him over, Deaton_ – because he knows she will, he _knows_ like he does the exact shade of her hair in both sun and moonlight, the constellation of dimples that appear when she is genuinely happy and, now, the feeling of her lips against his – Stiles says, “Deaton, you should have just let me drown in a corner. Deaton, she’s been _poisoned_ and you’re not doing anything, Deaton, what kind of healer are you.”  
  
A corner of the denounced healer’s mouth ticks up, too slight for most others to discern. “I apologize,” he says. “I would have let you drown in any corner of my infirmary of your choosing, but then you wouldn’t be around to hear that Mistress Lydia is fine.”  
  
“See,” Lydia says, and _oh_ , if Stiles doesn’t turn and do exactly that. He sees the flush of her eyes and cheeks, the dark of her hair as it clings to her neck, the shallow breaths that pass through her lips; he sees the outline of moisture dripping down her temples, how it pools in the hollow of her throat and other parts of her skin, her dress clinging wet in frankly inappropriate places, and he could throw another fit right then and there.  
  
Instead, he focuses on stilling the faint tremor of his hands, the last vestiges of panic racing across his chest. _How embarrassing,_ he thinks to himself without the actual embarrassment. How can he, when he hasn’t even fully recovered from what had unnerved him to begin with?  
  
“Look at how he is rubbing his chest,” Lydia is in the midst of telling Deaton, when Stiles finally breaks his silence, demands, “How are you fine? How is she fine?”  
  
Deaton answers, “A mild poisoning, likely from contact with an herb or mineral. In most cases, there would be no reason for any showing of symptoms at all, but...” A thoughtful look passes over his face again.  
  
“Deaton. Spit it out.”  
  
So Deaton says, “It cannot be confirmed until our great leader awakens, but – it seems you have found yourself a pack, Mistress Lydia.”

 

* * *

* * *

 

 **Naturalis Historia  
_LIGHTNING_**  
_A formidable force of nature, capable of inciting fires and hot enough to change sand into glass. The only known creatures to have successfully harnessed this element are thunder kitsunes, or a hybrid thereof. This capacity is believed to be a result of their many tails, which when rubbed together, precipitate foxfire in the form of lightning. **  
**_  
_A popular saying is that lightning never strikes the same place twice, taken to mean that misfortune never falls twice in the same way. Whether actual lightning can strike the same place twice or not is still to be empirically determined, but from the coastal villages comes the astonishing account of a man who experienced just that while standing beneath a tree during a thunderstorm. According to witnesses, the first strike had killed him. The second strike, however, which entered through his heart, resurrected him. If anything, it can be said that misfortune didn’t fall on him twice in the same way._

 

* * *

 

 

Lydia leaves the infirmary with the encyclopedia tucked underneath her arm and every part of her trembling. She thinks of the maids who will not cross the threshold to her chambers, how every corridor she walks down is strangely absent of guards or gentry, of the whispers that are too passionate and frightened to be muted. Harbinger of death, they say. A curse fallen upon our king and his dominion, upon these very halls.  
  
Harbinger of death. She comes to a standstill underneath an open archway. Outside, the rain continues to beat incessantly, casting a sterling sheen against the darker backdrop. _The graves continue to multiply by your spade, Lydia_ , it seems to be saying. _How many more before you are satisfied?_  
  
Lydia has only ever met Allison’s father once, during the spring storms, when he had come to visit his daughter toward the end of her first year in Martin. Despite the rain, Headmaster Argent had been distinguished and orderly, cut in the way Lydia had, by eleven, already grown to associate with the larger cities – all neat corners and immaculate shirts and perfectly trimmed fingernails. In one hand he held a bundled package and, under the arm of the other, he carried a cane. The package was for both Allison and Lydia – an assortment of spun taffies, fried honeydoughs, dried venison and nuts – but the cane became grandmother’s. “Gerard cannot be trusted any longer,” Christopher of the Argents had told grandmother while Lydia and Allison listened with their ears pressed against the door and their mouths sticky with honey. “We must protect him from himself – what he is becoming. Naturally, I thought of you.”  
  
“I suppose I am not getting any younger,” Lorraine had replied with a careless sort of laugh reserved only for company. The laughter slips into a quiet sigh, then another. “All right, then. But I must warn you, little pitchers have big ears,” and so that had been that.  
  
Later, when the headmaster found Lydia studying the silver emblem on his cloak, his only words had been, “We protect those who cannot protect themselves,” and Lydia had nodded gravely. The history of the guild Argent was renowned throughout their kingdom – how they had been the first family to publicly devote themselves to the protection of mankind through the vanquishing of wayward creatures, although nowadays they dealt primarily with werewolves. As Allison had recited in explanation, it was to act as nemesis to the Hales, should they ever lead the kingdom astray.  
  
But later that night, with Allison snoring softly in the bed beside her and the rain thrumming onto the thatching above them, Lydia had thought of Gerard, who had needed to be protected from himself. The situation itself had not been difficult to put together – the cane that now rested in grandmother’s chambers, the lessening of lines around the headmaster’s eyes. It was the reason for such a confiscation that had Lydia lying awake in her bed, wondering. Perhaps Gerard was an older man who was not fit enough to walk alone any longer, yet insisted on doing so. Perhaps Gerard was someone who found pleasure in beating his wife and family with the cane. Whatever the case, Lydia had in that moment considered how the Argent family motto did not solely refer to distant, corporeal monsters.  
  
Most of all, eleven-year old Lydia had wondered with a chill of foreboding, even as her hand had reached out to brush against Allison’s, _What would_ I _have taken away from me, were I to become a danger?  
_  
A much older Lydia now watches the storm rage outside, rain falling like the silver arrowheads the Argents so deeply pride themselves on, and she wonders what Christopher of the Argents would say if he were here. If he would look at her as she is now and say, _you still have too much_.  
  
She remembers Valack’s words, how soothsayers answered to human law, but oracles had their heavens. She thinks of all this, thinks of the boy she has kissed, the king and bluebloods she has befriended and watches the rain; thinks, the heavens must know now, how deeply she is entrenched. How deeply she has fallen in love.  
  
And so, when she takes her first step out into the storm, the only thought that remains within her is whether the heavens care as much as the Argents did.  
  
This – her, standing pensive in the rain as water slides over her skin and under her clothes – is how Stiles finds her some time later. There is a moment where he balks; startled, certainly, by the prospect of finding anyone outside in this weather, and then he is hurrying out from beneath the corridor.  
  
He is equally soaked by the time he is close enough for Lydia to hear him shouting over the din, “What are you _doing?_ Are you out of your mind?”  
  
For a brief moment, Lydia considers him. Then, “Yes,” she says, an answer he will not hear above the falling of rain. A laugh bubbles up her throat, light and condemning. “Almost certainly, I think.” Out of her mind and over her head. And all these things again, for believing that she wasn’t.  
  
But she allows him to lead her back in, both of them dripping wet against the flagstones. The set of his eyes and mouth when he looks at her again under the flickering of torchlight, is enough to shear a sharp cut through her amusement, reminds her of when he had found her balancing on a windowsill five-stories high, that wild look consuming his features. It reminds her all over again of her words, his words, words she cannot say and words she desperately wants to.  
  
“Do you remember, maybe a quarter of an hour ago, when Deaton instructed you to ‘rest’?” Stiles shakes loose water from his hair and eyes, continues, “What just happened is a perfect example of something that would _not_ be in that category. Lydia, you’re supposed to be _in recovery_.”  
  
Lydia is a beat too late in her reply, says, “I was hot,” which causes him to glance lower than her neckline – startled eyes fleeing back onto hers less than half a breath later.  
  
“All right, well,” he says, too distracted by what he had found to pursue what he had thought strange in hers, “I think we should maybe both change our clothing if we don’t want to spend the next week with a cold.” He gathers her shoes and book – “who had time to write all this” – and gestures for her to come along. They walk in tandem, soles leaving behind wet imprints, and Lydia doesn’t have to try too hard to believe that, in that moment, there are no secrets stretching the distance between them.

 

* * *

  
  
He walks her to her room and waits until she has opened the door before handing back her belongings. The cover of the encyclopedia is warm and slightly soggy from where his hand had been. Lydia thinks wildly that if Deaton finds its condition reprehensible, she will gladly copy him another and purchase this one from him, just to run her hand over the dried indent of Stiles’ on waterlogged pages.  
  
“Thank you,” she says at length, because what else are you supposed to say to a soulmate who has had a fit of nerves on her behalf, only to end up being forcefully kissed by her and carrying her heavy encyclopedia up four flights of stairs?  
  
Stiles blinks but does not reply, and she watches as his chest rises briefly, rapidly – as if he is about to speak – only to deflate as he subsequently exhales, mouth parting slightly. The muscles in his throat bob as he swallows, contemplates, and then his tongue is pressing against a corner of his mouth for half a moment before he says, “Lydia, let me – ”  
  
He stops, and Lydia finds it disconcerting to see him at such a loss for words. She nearly jumps when the feeling of wet, coarse wool brushes against her fingers and she realizes belatedly that her hand has reached out of its own accord to touch the back of his arm. He is as warm as the sun beneath her fingertips despite having been so thoroughly soaked and in that moment, she understands.  
she realizes: she is a lunar moth. She will always be drawn to his light.  
  
“Lydia,” Stiles says again, staring at where her thumb rubs into the warmth of his sleeve as if one slight movement will send her into flight. “Can I – ” His own hand reaches up, grasps hers and pulls it gently away from his arm, clasps it in both his hands and he stares down at this connection between them as if it is a physical manifestation of everything he has ever wanted to understand.  
  
“Let me come to you,” he says, finally. “After you – I – we – clean up. Let me come back. Just to check on you, I swear. Danny and one of the twins are watching Scott for the remainder of the night, and Braeden, the girls. And you need to rest. It would only be for a moment – ”  
  
It is a good thing he has left her other hand alone, because she uses this to flick him on the forehead. Only then does he glance up, lashes long and thick, and she lifts her chin and does not shiver. “I’ll order tea,” she tells him, and she _does_ shiver then at the darkening of his eyes as he regards her.  
  
Stiles only repeats, “You need to rest,” words slower, a heavier weight to them now as if she is not their sole recipient any longer. He squeezes her hand once, brief, before releasing it and leans back – as if offering her another chance.  
  
Lydia does not know whether to laugh or to weep or to kick him as Liam’s soulmate did to him. This boy chooses _now,_ of all times, to consider propriety, to act as if being alone with her in her quarters is an unmentionable scandal. _My god_ , she thinks and regards him with near incredulity, where were you when we were alone in my grandmother’s house? Or when we fell asleep together that time beneath the trees? Or when I _kissed_ you, alone in a storage room? Or any of those other instances, where we were slipping our way beneath the other’s bones?  
  
And perhaps there is something considerably more scandalous about his request when placed in the context of their surroundings, but there are more scandalous things that this boy in front of her does not even know he has already accomplished.

 

* * *

 **  
  
** When Lydia opens the door, his hair is sticking in ten different directions, messy and half-dried. She is reminded of when they were still at her family’s manor and he had come back from washing up that first day, his hair wet and curling, his first words still echoing in her ears. How, despite the pain that had followed, that first feeling of warmth had curled its way into her belly, as low and confusing as it is now. **  
**  
Lydia moves aside to let him pass before closing the door. As with all living quarters, there is first a small foyer that branches into an equally modest dining room and bedroom. From the way Stiles enters, though, it is as if he is witnessing this layout for the first time.  
  
“Tea,” Lydia says, nodding to the tray a maid had left earlier outside her door. It now rests atop the table in Lydia’s sitting room and when Stiles has seated himself on one side of the couch, he reaches out and pours each of them a cupful of tea, looking as if he is hardly registering the movements. His brows furrow in the next moment and then he is whipping his head to look at her.

“ _Wait,_ ” he says loudly, and Lydia is startled into almost dropping her cup. Stiles takes this opportunity to swallow _his_ cup in one a single gulp, and what happens next could have been easily prevented had he understood that tea is a beverage commonly served hot. Lydia watches somewhat impassively as a horrendous sound – along with what remains of the liquid – sprays from her soulmate’s mouth.  
  
After a few minutes of this, he rasps out, “Burned my throat clean off, but my bet is on the illegal temperature. Otherwise safe, I think,” and she waits until he is able to blink through his tears before fixing him with an astringent look.  
  
She says, “You will not be my cupbearer.”  
  
“I wasn’t aware I was,” Stiles replies, still wincing.  
  
Lydia repeats, “You will not be my cupbearer,” and his attempt at innocence when he asks, “Do you not trust me enough?” is ruined by the grit still in his throat.  
  
She tells him, “I don’t need a tester.”  
  
“So you _do_ trust me.”  
  
“Should I not?” she asks, lightly. “It would be so much more convenient.”  
  
“No, I think you should. I’m incredibly trustworthy. Have I mentioned that the king considers me a close confidante?”  
  
“As I’m sure the Caesar did Brutus.”  
  
“That is a Brut-al accusation,” he says calmly, and she sits there, less than five feet of space between them, unable to believe he has done this.  
  
“I am also very funny,” he points out.  
  
“No,” she says, “you’re not.” But there is a smile breaking out across her face, slow and incredulous.  
  
“But also, I can assure you that any solidarity between the king and I is fully mutual and grounded in an understanding that began before either of us were fully weaned. The relationship between Caesar and Brutus developed later and may have been more one-sided, fueled moreso by Caesar’s decidedly un-platonic affiliation with Brutus’ mother.” There is a short pause, and then, as if he is afraid she cannot glean this part for herself, says, “I’ve read the entire literary works as written by Kleio. I’m a scribe.”  
  
Lydia stares at him. She does not want to believe it, but, “Are you attempting to” – _what?_ she thinks – “impress me?”  
  
“I think so,” he says. “Yes. Are you particularly impressed at this given moment?” _At any moment?_  
  
And he may be some naval ship hidden among the coastal fog, his sights set only on mapping her shorelines, but there are some things you cannot obtain without giving a part of yourself away in return. It is fleeting, but she catches a glimpse of him: his masts and ports, him younger and just as glib, trailing after those always to be taller, older, stronger – understanding, even then, that he was to be a human among old magic and a gladiator among kings; that he would only have his wit to serve as both weapon and armor.  
  
You see, a silver tongue makes for armor that is nothing if not intricate, but also for armor that is brittle, and there will always be questions it does not know how to ask, hungers and yearnings it cannot find the words for. Lydia hears the creaks beneath his prompt and longs to reach out, to hold him and say _, I’ve always been captivated, you fool. I’ve been captivated by you since you first arrived, filthy and unconscious, on the back of that horse._  
  
“You’ve never needed to try,” she hears herself say instead, and pain blooms tight and aching in her throat to see how his eyes lighten.  
  
He says then, in a tone the fading rasp accentuates, “I want to. You’re my soulmate, Lydia,” and it’s the first time either of them has spread the words between them but he says it like it’s something frank and unapologetic. “You’re everything I need to try for.”  
  
This, Lydia understands with astonishing clarity. Yet, “Not everything,” is what she says aloud, and sips her tea.  
  
Stiles does not relent, only says, “You’ve been _poisoned_ – from what, no one knows, not even Deaton. At least humor me until we find a better lead.”  
  
Deaton doesn’t know, Lydia thinks wryly, because he has chosen not to. “Poisoned not from ingestion, Stiles. And I won’t humor you, not at the expense of your life. If anything, I’ll call for a royal taster.”  
  
She watches a myriad of emotions shutter across his face at her words: frustration, panic, wariness, and thinks, _so, so_. He has heard the whispers wandering these halls, floating from beneath the stairs, saying that an oracle cannot predict her own death. He has heard the glee, the hope in the voices, and he has taken them to heart.  
  
“It wasn’t from ingestion, Stiles,” she repeats for him, patient.  
  
“And the next time?” he says.  
  
Lydia pauses, caught between the growing need to ease his worry and her own unwillingness to unspool this particular ball of yarn. She says, at length, “If it is by the same hand, then it will again be through tactility,” and alarm flashes through Stiles’ eyes as they lift to gauge her words against her expression.  
  
Slowly, unwillingly, he says, “What are you talking about. Why – ” there is an almost extraordinary pause in which she can very clearly see the slots fitting themselves into place, knows the exact moment it all clicks by the way he says, “ _Lydia_ ,” says her name like it is a question and a groan.  
  
“Lydia,” Stiles repeats. “ _What did you do?_ ”  
  
“Do you not trust me enough?” she asks lightly, the words of his earlier question. “I didn’t poison anyone, if that is what you’re concerned about.”  
  
Stiles says, wild-eyed, “I’m not concerned about that. I didn’t even think about that. Why would I think about that? Lydia.”  
  
Any other person would deem him half-mad at this point – the blatant fuss he is creating over a simple fever long abated. Lydia, however, can read him as clear as day and knows he is fast approaching a trail she would like him to steer clear of as long as possible. So she says, “Breathe, dear heart. I must have inadvertently brushed against foxglove or wolfsbane while picking wildflowers.”  
  
For a wild moment, Lydia thinks Stiles is going to say something reprehensible and stupid like _that’s a lie but just to be safe you are never allowed to go picking wildflowers again_ , but he only sighs, long-drawn and tired, and rests his head in his hands.  
  
“All right,” she hears him mumble. “All right.”  
  
Lydia is halfway through her third cup of tea when finally lifts his head. “In hindsight, I may have flown off the handle,” he says, “although this entire day has pretty much been me flying off handles.”  
  
Before Lydia can reply, he adds, “And on _your_ part, endearments,” because he is Stiles and if there is any part of the whole willing to define him, it is his ability to pick apart and hoard information like a magpie for later use, regardless of his circumstances.  
  
There is nothing Lydia can say to that – a loud silence stretching in her head – though she will never admit to this, and so she simply folds her hands in her lap and waits. If anything, Stiles can carry on a whole conversation by himself until she finds a niche suitable enough to interject. Lydia does not feel like interjecting – she can hardly feel the tip of her tongue at this point, from how hard she has been clenching it.  
  
Stiles, because he is equally capable of acting like an ass, does not give her another choice. “How often do you think this will be occurring on your end?” he says. “If regularly, I will be forced to confer with my timetable.”  
  
“Not hardly as often as you’d like,” Lydia snaps then, unwilling to consider the pinkness of her cheeks.  
  
“ _‘Timetable,’_ ” she scoffs.  
  
“Several, in fact. Is that jealousy?”  
  
Lydia does not know whether to laugh or rage or kiss him again. “ _Sweet heart_ ,” she says, and the words are spilling faster than she can filter them, “whose words are written on your skin?”  
  
“Oh,” he says, and _poor boy_ the whispers had said, but Lydia wonders whether they would say the same looking at him now – watching as he lets the sound drop from between his lips, his eyes lit wondrous and his teeth flashing sharper than knives. This is the expression of someone who sought only a sheaf of wheat and instead found a kingdom. In that one moment, in this one word, something has shifted, and Lydia feels the weight of ocean tides purling around her heart. “Not jealousy, then. Are you having regrets?”  
  
Lydia refuses to dignify him with a response, verbal or otherwise, not even when she feels him shifting closer by one, two, three feet, until she feels herself unwillingly being pulled into his orbit, the heat emanating from him warmer than any sun.  
  
“Ly-di-a,” he wheedles.  
  
Lydia knows if she looks at him now she will only become caught in the undertow of liquid amber, the cunning little bastard, so she stares at the tea tray until he is the one succumbing, who admits, “The only timetable I have was used to calculate the best trajectory for launching hardboiled eggs at Derek Hale from across the courtyard.”  
  
_Poor Derek of Hale,_ Lydia thinks, grim, and slants him a look that says just as much.  
  
“Oh, _no,_ ” Stiles tells her. “I did not lose half of my hair to his fists so I could be falsely painted as the evildoer,” and when did they grow so close that she cannot tell her breath from his in this space between them, that he can read off her eyes as easily as ink on parchment? She thinks: two weeks ago, I could barely look him in the eyes and now I cannot stop.  
  
“Do you regret me?” The question slips out from him – a mistake. Lydia knows, because she is still looking at him when he says it; she catches the infinitesimal widening of his eyes, the way his irises are swallowed by black, the cords in his neck tightening.  
  
She is careful when she answers. “No,” she tells him, kind and gentle and as solemnly as she knows how. _Read me,_ she thinks as she looks into his eyes. _Know me to be true._ “I thank the heavens every day for thinking you mine,” and she is a shoreline, watching as his throat bobs, a vessel lost at sea.

 

* * *

  
  
_Hello,  
  
Here are some ~~tros~~ ~~trao~~ ~~trow~~ pants for you. You said you wanted them the othur day. Here you go. Enjoy?  
  
-Malia  
  
P.S. Thank you for taking me out with you. I missed the fields a lot so it was realy nice to go.  
  
P.P.S.S. Also thank you for the notes. I will look them ovur._

 

* * *

  
  
The first morning Scott, the human boy, does not wake is the same morning Theo comes for him, billowing through the corridors like a grim reaper, hounds in tow.  
  
Lydia leaps off her bed, onto the balcony, and looks down. The inner courtyard is thick with soldiers – some leaving in platoons, others strapping on belts and helmets – with orders being shouted, servants and footmen scurrying like mice alongside the walls. “Greenberg, why am I still holding your breastplate when you’re already supposed to be _saddled?_ ” a familiar voice shouts above the clamor.  
  
In the far corner near the gates, a figure cuts through the crowd barely half-dressed himself. Lydia’s hands clench on the railing.  
  
“Stiles,” she says, suddenly unable to breathe. When he continues to yell insubordination, she leans over and calls louder, “Stiles!”  
  
The boy glances up, squinting in the morning sunlight, and the same fear blooming tight across her chest twists his expression when he sees her. “Stay there, Lydia,” he is saying then, even as their eyes meet and they both know his words are a lost cause. “Theo’s here – the others are safe, but he has Scott. We don’t know where they – Lydia, _don’t_ – Lydia!”  
  
But Lydia is already back inside her room, heart thundering louder than his words and her thoughts combined. _Theo is here._ Her hands scrabble at the knobs of the drawer underneath her writing desk, pulling it open as she grabs for the closest shirt and one of the trousers Malia had snuck her some time ago. From inside the drawer rolls out seven vials of volatile, milky liquid.  
  
The trouser she slips into may be from Malia, but it had been Deaton who slipped the glass cylinders into her hands all those days ago, had said, “They should be kept away from light and broken only when they intend to be used.” It was into these vials Lydia had poured her final efforts – the thrice-strained product of her mortar and pestle stained permanently with darkened cole. It is these vials that Lydia tucks now into her leather bag and slings over her shoulder.   
  
She slips into her shoes, loiters indecisively for a few good moments before finally grabbing her cane, tucking it into the loop of her belt, and hurries out the door. Her lone footsteps slap against the stone hallways, reminding Lydia that _Theo is here, hurry, it is time, there is no time_. She pushes out onto the rooftop – “You!” a stationed guard calls, only for another to hush him with a sharp _quiet you twit, that’s the_ oracle – swipes the hair fallen into her eyes, and glances over the edge of a crenel. From here, she can see most everything – within and beyond the inner and outer courtyards, the curtain walls, the rolling hills and woodlands to the north, the sloping city to the south.  
  
Lydia takes in a deep breath, her hands gripping tight onto the stone ledge, and closes her eyes. If her time with Valack had been good for anything, it would be learning how to give in to her senses. Valack had, after all, depended on her to track down the Doctors, had forced her to locate an elderly woman in Calavera from description alone. And this – _this_ was a matter of life and death, this was not some mere trial run, and Lydia thinks with sweaty palms and only inches from panicking that she cannot fall short, she _cannot fail_.  
  
It is easier today, to consciously give in to the lull – the “frequency,” in Valack’s term – and this in of itself sends Lydia’s veins thrumming with anxiety. The whispers of the dead have always been closer, louder, whenever the timing of a possible cataclysm is nigh and they rush past Lydia now, swarming around her with their words and hands until she is close to drowning.  
  
Lydia grits her teeth in response and digs her fingers into her palms for an anchoring point. She closes her eyes and mentally _shoves_ against the voices tangibly surrounding her, feels them ripple away like waves only to always come rushing back. But, slowly, she wades through the seemingly neverending sea of whispers and warnings, screams and cries, all the while forcing herself to think _Scott, Scott, Scott_ \- until it is his name that echoes loudest in the space around her, carries itself through the sluggish tides emanating from her every step, returning to her heavy with impending death.

_Scott – scott – scoa – sca – sa – saaa – ce – ce – ce – cen –_

she hears echoing softly, softly around her and she concentrates harder, stumbles blindly toward the heightening whispers, her heart pounding.

_Cent – ra – ra – Sco – cen – nnnnNN –_

Too late does she realize her misstep, that split moment of carelessness borne from urgency. A wave crashes over her head, leaving her spluttering, gasping for air as she is once again enveloped by the echoing discord of voices, Scott’s thread lost among them.  
  
_No, no, no,_ she thinks in despair, in fury, at herself and the voices pressing incessantly against her skull until she is fit to burst from it all. _I don’t have time, I don’t have time,_ and what had Valack told her?  
  
_Do not lose sight of yourself,_ he had reprimanded as he pulled her out of the depths for what seemed to be the hundredth time _, because you will not be the only one desperate for an audience – desperate for an anchor to latch on to_.  
  
The waves surge higher again, curling around her throat, and in the distance, she hears a heightening flood of voices rushing toward her, begging to be swallowed into her belly. But Lydia remembers Allison instead, remembers to _cup your hands and use your throat as the arrow_ , and so she screams into the void, as fiercely and as dreadfully as she feels – **_WHERE IS SCOTT_** – and in that one instant, the roiling waves flow free – calm and tranquil as pond water – and only a single echo returns:  
  
_Central square.  
_  
In the next instant, Lydia is falling.  
  
  
Her head cracks against the stone floor, hard enough to jolt her back into heavy-limbed consciousness and, without the slightest idea as to how, Lydia finds herself already scrambling up with scraped knees, a blurry vision, a desperate mouthful of words that takes her tongue three tries to unfurl.  
  
“What is the fastest route to the central square?” she demands, and the only reply she receives comes from the distant clamoring below. The guards stationed in front of her are unearthly, laughably silent, eyes trained on the ground. _Respectfully_ , they would claim in their defense, and something tight and angry coils up within her.  
  
She steps on step forward.  
  
“Your _sovereign king_ is going to die and here you are, standing on some rooftop afraid of your own deaths when hadn’t you sworn his life before yours? Tell me: _what is the fastest route to the central square?_ ” and watches as they collectively flinch, as – after seconds impossibly long – one finally steps forward to answer with shaking knees and voice, “Through the fourth road and eastern market, blessed one.”  
   
_Blessed one._ Lydia thinks she can laugh until she is sick.

 

* * *

  
  
It is market day within the city and Lydia cannot help but bitterly consider Theo’s penchant for theatrics. As it winds toward the square, the eastern market tapers into an even larger central bazaar, full of shouts and spices and livestock that puts even the market in Reyes to shame. Lydia cradles her bag carefully within her arms, curling protectively over it, and allows herself to be buffeted by the crowds of men, women, and children alike, towards the center square.  
  
“Citizens of our beloved king’s dominion, I beg for a moment of your time.” Theatrics, indeed.  
  
Theo stands alone atop a wooden platform stationed in the front of a butcher shop. He does not need to clang pots or hire a herald – his presence is enough. People stop to stare at this unfamiliar, handsome boy – some wander closer, others lingering at the edges, and children run up, unafraid and eager for what entertainment he has to offer.  
  
In an open stand beside Theo, the butcher and his wife stoically cleave through a fresh pile of what seems to be pork bits, but Lydia notices the whites quivering around their eyes, the sweat dotting the butcher’s temples as he periodically shifts his gaze between the chimera, the wooden house behind him, and the closely gathering crowd. Lydia tightens the shawl covering her head, careful to feel for any wayward strands of hair, and moves closer.  
  
As she does, her eyes catch on a glint of amber from up on the rooftops, a feat she would not have been able to accomplish for anyone other than her soulmate, and Lydia’s heart catches in her throat. Peering closer, she sees a matching silver glint nocked and just as sharp, and she is reminded that uncalloused fingers do not annul the fact that Stiles is the son of the royal captain. She purses her lips, tucks the scarf more securely over her head and ducks her shoulders.  
  
From the stage, Theo begins to speak. He says, “For years we’ve enjoyed prosperity under the rule of our king, true and sovereign, the youngest in a millennium. The threat of war is no more, the council tells us. For the first time in a century, we have successfully enacted treaties with Fairvale to the east and Devenford to the north.”  
  
“But, dear citizens, I beg you to consider this: Fairvale, who deals in darker, stranger magic and has long terrorized our eastern rocklands finds themselves agreeing to our terms. Devenford, who has held the upper hand over us in both resources and military prowess for over two centuries, has suddenly acceded to our whims. What possibly could have convinced _them_ , our most feared of neighbors?”  
  
A flash of movement on the rooftops catches Lydia’s eyes then, and she lifts her head enough to see a guard pointing two arrows at a nearby section of the crowd. Lydia carefully follows the guard’s line of sight until she sees the target: a quiet, hooded figure reeking of death and sour bandages – even from such a distance – stands with its taloned hand curved gently over a child’s shoulder, such that the tip of its forefinger digs perfectly into the boy’s jugular. The boy is too afraid to cry aloud, tears and snot dripping silently down his face instead, a wet stain pooling on the front of his trousers. There is a terribly familiar look to him, and then Lydia is glancing back at the butcher’s wife in horror.  
  
“A better government, perhaps,” Theo is musing aloud, as Lydia slowly reaches into her bag and retrieves a vial. “Although I would not expect anything _profound_ from the same circle of elders that have been elected for over five and twenty years. As they say, you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. So it must be our sovereign leader, then, who has instilled such changes.”  
  
“Geddoff the stage, ya bore!” a voice calls out from among the crowd, accompanied by similar heckles, but Theo only smiles, says, “Gentlemen, please. I assure you – your time will be well repaid.”  
  
Jeers and shouts ring out again – only, this time, to be overridden by a terrible, muffled roar.  
  
_Scott._ And Lydia nearly drops her vial, nearly runs out of the crowd toward the house the sound comes from because _oh,_ how does she know that her king is in pain? The pack bond, she thinks numbly, and wants equally as much to look up to where she knows – with that same, sure familiarity – that Stiles lies in wait, heart pounding, unable to move as he listens to the chimera’s slander, to his best friend’s agony.  
  
A smile continues to grace Theo’s lips as the noise of the crowd trickles into a bewildered silence. “Oh,” he says, “Have I your attention now?” and one of the men is brave enough to ask, “Whuddy’ve got back there, sir – yer dog?”  
  
Theo laughs. “No,” he replies, “not mine as much as shared property,” and the charitable façade is slipping from his face like blistering oil. The crowd does not dare mock Theo now, looking as he does. Someone steps on Lydia’s toes as the front row begins drawing back.  
  
Theo raises his voice and continues, “You foolhardy people. The family Argent warned us of this, and where are they now? Deceased and exiled, all within two years of our king’s rule. You may remember how their youngest heir was brutally killed not even a year ago. She died honorably, they said, protecting the kingdom. Yes, but against what? Against _what?_ ”  
  
The crowd flinches back as one – both from the menace in his voice and the answering howl that rattles the thin, wooden walls of the butcher’s house. In the next instant, the door is bursting open and a dark, monstrous blur leaps out from within – only to be yanked unceremoniously back by a thick, silver chain looped around the neck.  
  
There is an unspoken belief that daylight brings with it courage. Monsters exposed are never as frightening as they seem under darkness. It is the juxtaposition, perhaps – the reality of coming face-to-face with a creature outside of its presumed domain – perhaps the meticulous sun’s attention to detail – but sunlight does nothing except to render Scott as even more terrifying. Red too dark, too viscous to be anything but blood paints his muzzle and leaks from his eyes, pink-tinted saliva dripping from large, glistening fangs. Here, among stalls and houses and people, he seems monstrous in comparison. _Savage_.  
  
“Against what, indeed?” In the silence of both the crowd and the wolfenking, Theo answers his own question, says softly, “I would argue, against the very one who claims to be protecting us all. Our young, beloved king. Her soulmate.”  
  
There will always be that first cry, high and soft and perhaps unintended. But there only ever needs to be that one, potent enough to light the fears of those surrounding it. Those occupying the front row begins backing away in earnest now – slowly at first, then frantically – but only when Scott abruptly springs forward does chaos erupt in its truest form. A new figure emerges from the house as Scott lands onto the dirt-covered ground; a girl, with yellow eyes and markings on the left half of her face that seem to _ripple_. Held easily in her hand is the end of Scott’s chain.  
  
The crowd, now held back by a row of equally apprehensive guards, forms a raucous, morbidly fascinated half-moon around Scott. Saliva and blood drips wet onto the dirt as he prowls closer, teeth bared, and the guards are shouting for everyone to _get back, get back now_ , but no one is listening – too distracted when Scott lunges toward them again.  
  
From where she is squeezed among the shouting, sweating mob, Lydia sees the red of Scott’s eyes flitting through gaps and crevices of undulating bodies. This close, they are not as blinded with bloodlust – and perhaps it is because she had spent all those days with this same form in the forest or simply because she is desperate to find a glimmer of hope, but she cannot help but think that these eyes are _searching_ , instead.  
  
_For what?_ But there is a prickling feeling running itself over Lydia’s body and there is a very large chance that she may already know.  
  
Amid the screaming crowd afraid of their king to the yelling guards afraid to hurt their king, Theo alone stands smiling, an angelic counterpart to Scott’s monstrosity with his carefully slicked hair and chiseled features. But the chimera cannot ever compare to Scott – Scott with his heart of gold who, even cursed, has only the instinct to protect his people. A fact the rest of Scott’s pack may know but the remaining kingdom does not.  
  
A fact that _Theo_ knows, and it is in this instant that Lydia realizes why she had so easily located Scott within the void, had sensed that death surrounding him – not his own, but the death of the butcher’s child by his hands.  
  
It will be accidental, she thinks, looking at the chimera who has so carefully orchestrated this performance, but it will be enough to turn the tides. After all, a kingdom divided cannot stand, and Lydia thinks of what Theo had said to Stiles that day in the woods, of ushering in a ‘new world’ – a new kingdom. _His_ kingdom, Lydia knows now, and both horror and anger swell in one tremendous wave until she is choking on it.  
  
You coward, she thinks to the chimera standing. You _coward_. As if any of us would let you – as if _I_ would let you, because here is what she also knows: that he has a pack to do his bidding and that the figure who reeks of bandages and a stench so familiar to Theo’s own is surely one of them.  
  
At the front of the crowd, Scott roars again and scrabbles against his leash toward his people – in a direction Lydia now understands with perfect clarity.  
  
A kingdom divided, she thinks grimly and grips her first vial harder, cannot stand.  
  
So the next time Scott makes a desperate leap to save the boy he knows has been taken hostage, Lydia breaks the neck of the vial against her cane, does not allow herself to even consider thinking, and lunges toward the boy instead. She grabs the figure’s forefinger so that it lifts from the boy’s neck and bends it backward, shoving the child aside with bodily force so that she is now in his position. Lydia does not shy away from the cloaked figure – instead, she uses her remaining momentum to meet it halfway and shoves the open vial into its open palm.  
   
A scream – harsh and surprised – erupts from the creature and in the next instant she is being thrown onto the ground as it rushes at her. Something strong and awful hums through her veins and Lydia finds herself rolling away – scrambling to her feet, dodging the fleeing bodies of other, equally frantic, people – before her mind can even properly register the motions of her body. Her hand digs frantically into the bottom of her bag for another vial even as thick, cloying fear clouds her mind – that there had been a misstep in her calculations, that the last two weeks had been for naught, that she had added fuel to the fire instead of extinguishing it.  
  
But when she looks up, vial at the ready, only to see that the creature has not made a single new step toward her, silver and red pouring down its hand. Lydia catches a glimpse of frenzied brown eyes staring at her from beneath the hood and bandages before the creature jerks once – twice – and falls to the ground, twin arrows protruding from its backside.  
  
Around her, the crowd has since dissipated into a panic. Mothers grabbing their children, shopkeepers abandoning their stations without a second thought, people throwing themselves into the nearest sanctuary, but before Lydia can consider much else, she is being flung against the wall of a nearby alley.  
  
She does not remember falling, only that whatever happens she _cannot break any vials_ and so, her head and ears ringing, the first thing Lydia does is to furtively peek at the vial in her hand. Unbroken – and only then does she allow pain to seep into her consciousness. A metallic taste fills her mouth when she slowly rolls onto her feet.  
  
Standing in the mouth of the alley is the girl who had been holding Scott’s chains. There is nothing in her hands now save for her gleaming talons.  
  
The girl says, “So Theo was right. It _is_ the oracle,” and Lydia watches in mute fascination as the markings on her face begins glowing. The girl snarls and her teeth begin elongating. “Tell me, blessed one, is it true that you cannot read the hand death deals you? Because how much stranger that _I_ can,” and she leaps toward Lydia.  
  
Lydia is no match in speed or brute strength, has nothing other than the element of surprise, and so she can only angle herself so that her weaker left side is exposed, waits until the other girl is close enough to sink her talons into Lydia’s arm. It is in this moment – when Lydia feels the blinding pain of flesh being torn into, knows that the girl will be inadvertently bound to her for another second longer – that she forces herself to move. She swings forward the vial clutched in her stronger, uninjured arm and drives it deep into the chimera’s soft, open side.  
  
The girl screams then – no hint of fear or pain, but _fury_ , pure and violent, and Lydia nearly screams herself as the talons rip free from her arm. Instead, she runs.  
  
She does not stop for breath or inquiry until she is certain there is no presence looming behind her and, only then, does she look back, bracing herself. The girl is crawling toward her from the other end of the alleyway, leaving behind a trail of silver-tinted sludge as she drags herself on elbows and knees. Slowly, Lydia reaches back and retrieves the cane with her good arm.  
  
“Run, you better run, little red,” the girl hisses, and Lydia watches as a single drop of silver pools on the tip of a canine, globular and viscous, before shattering on the cobblestoned ground, “because I am going to _eat you –_ I am going to make you _scream –_ ”  
  
She strikes from the ground then, as fast as any cobra, and in the same way as she did earlier, Lydia does not think – does not calculate the difference and cost in speed between her own worn muscles and those designed to never wear – she grasps her grandmother’s cane with both her hands **,** closes her eyes, and _swings_.  
  
The feeling of the wooden stick slugging into softer flesh is both brutal and confounding and Lydia’s eyes burst open as she is stumbling forward from the momentum. The chimera is slumped against the opposite wall and Lydia stares at her warily, in disbelief at how _easily_ the girl had been overpowered. But there is a dark silver staining the side of the cane, center and true, and Lydia thinks wildly as she tucks it back into her belt that, after this, perhaps she should consider a career in stickball.  
  
Nearby, dissonant screams break through this reverie, and Lydia’s shaking fingers retrieve a third vial, breaks it open against the brick wall. Blood drips down her injured arm, warm and slippery, and she grits her teeth through the wildfire spreading through her as she warily, slowly peeks out the alley.  
  
Bodies lie unconscious, strewn across the central square – guards and civilians alike – and a large sphere of blue-tinted lightning crackles around the center of the square, effectively trapping its victims. Lydia traces the circle to its origin – a boy she had not seen earlier, who stands with his hands outstretched beside Theo. Near them and within another, smaller, circle of mountain ash, lies Scott – _unmoving_.  
  
No. Lydia stares at the unmistakable mass, terror flashing white-hot through her. No, no, _no_ –  
  
“That makes two,” Theo says, his voice ringing unnaturally across the too-quiet square, and when Lydia manages to tear her eyes away from Scott, it is to find the chimera’s dark eyes looking straight at her. Cold sweat breaks out across her skin.  
  
“Come,” Theo says, beckoning gently to her as if she was some skittish, unbroken colt, and she cannot help but think about _just how much_ she would like to slap that smile from his face. “Come here, Lydia.”  
  
“ _Lydia, don’t!_ ” rings from the rooftops above them, and Theo’s smile only widens.  
  
“Lydia, come here,” he says, “or I’ll have Joshua rid everyone in his vicinity,” words that are met with stifled, horrified sobs from those corralled inside the lightning-forged prison.  
  
“ _Lydia –_ ”  
  
Lydia gently positions her left arm so that the long, red gouges will not brush against her clothes. She tucks her other arm behind the bag hanging from the same side, so that the vial is properly concealed, lifts her chin, and walks into the square.  
  
When she is close enough, the boy Joshua creates for her a small hole in the barrier and Theo strides forward to receive her. He reaches out to skim her throat with the back of his hand and Lydia sets her jaw, does not want to waste spit on him. But before she can step away from him, his hand wraps around her throat, pulling her to him so that her back lands with a thud against his chest.  
  
“Let’s see what it is you’ve done to my packmate, hmm?” Theo says then, pressing his nose to the slope of her shoulders. His hand squeezes tight around her injured arm and she cannot help the small, choked scream that worms its way from her chest.  
  
Theo uses this moment to wrench the vial from the loosened grip of her other hand and says, pleasantly, “Last time we didn’t get to finish our introductions. Lydia of Martin, oracle and beloved soulmate of the best friend of _my_ best friend. We are practically in-laws then.” He grasps her chin and nudges it upward, toward the rooftop where Stiles and his unit are. “Does Stiles know you’re here? No, I didn’t think so. My, what _is_ a relationship without trust.”  
  
“I know what you’re doing,” she hisses and the chimera only laughs, his breath hot against her ear.  
  
“Clever girl then, although you’ve always been.” He examines the vial in sunlight, its contents shimmering and viscous. “My god. What a thing of beauty. Do they know what you’ve accomplished?” When she does not reply, he says kindly, “Don’t be afraid – I won’t kill you. You’ve made your case, proven yourself too valuable to be wasted. I’d only like to share with you the fruits of your labor.”  
  
Three things happen then, seemingly all at once: the feeling of jagged glass as it tears through her throat, the sharp thud of an arrow as it burrows into flesh and, from behind them all, ringing out above all else – the most human, most magnificent roar Lydia has ever heard.

 

* * *

* * *

  
  
Outside the only window in this place, day blends into evening, into night, and Stiles sits alone with Lydia in the infirmary. Long after Deaton has tended to her and the others have left, Stiles remains. It had been like this weeks ago, when he had first carried her into this room, dripping and half-dead against him. Then, he had swept away the glass shattered by her screams, had sorted the vials, counted her breaths until his legs had stopped shaking. Then, it had taken him five tries and six matches before he could light the oil lamps.  
  
Now, he does not even bother. He does nothing but sit and count the exhales that make it past her half-parted mouth, the peeking of her teeth. He tucks another blanket around her feet, tucks her hand into both of his, listens for each passing of her breath and matches one for each of hers.  
  
In both, he thinks: let the next few hours of his life be measured by the dizzying, near hysterical knowledge that his soulmate is alive.

 

* * *

* * *

 

 **IX. Spica**  
_Autumn leaves fell like misting rain, our shadows growing longer_  
_Some days I found I could not bear_  
_The absence of your arms around me_  
_Some days I found I could dream only of_  
_Your arms around me_

 

* * *

  
  
Lydia opens her eyes to darkness, wakes with the knowledge that _she cannot breathe_. Her hands flutter to her throat – there is something wrong with her, _what is wrong_ – and pain bursts through her, so blinding it is as if the very center of her bones are caving in.  
  
“Lydia?” The soft sputter of a match being struck and then Stiles’ face comes into view, hazy and unfocused above her. Lydia feels more than sees him pulling her hands away, tucking them into his own, saying, “Hey, hey. Shh. It’s all right. Breathe with me. You’re okay,” and Lydia squeezes her eyes closed, grips painfully at his fingers until she can begin matching the pace of her breaths with his. A press of warmth washes over her forehead, her brows, the tip of her nose and chin; the feel of hands smooth over her cheeks.  
  
“You’re okay,” she hears him repeat, gentler than she has ever heard him and, bit by bit, Lydia’s lungs relearn how to breathe. It takes longer for her to open her eyes and, when she does, he is mere breaths away from her, his own eyes made incandescent by firelight. It hurts Lydia to see him like this, refulgent and long-lashed and _so close_ and, in a fit of melancholy, she wonders if this is what the moon must feel, upholding her veil night after night, knowing what – _who_ – waits on the other side. Suddenly, Stiles’ words spoken and on her skin are not enough – she wants to curl into his warmth, press every inch of herself against him until she becomes a part of him and even that won’t be close enough.  
  
Then he goes and says, “I didn’t even need to borrow your technique,” a rueful, teasing smile tucking itself into the corner of his mouth, and little boys shouldn’t play with fire.  
  
Lydia sits up fast enough to see stars. A foreign, whistling sound escapes her throat but she cannot be bothered. Later, she will bury her face into her pillow and _scream_ when she remembers what she has done, but in this moment she is intoxicated with the impossibility of having survived – made reckless from the terrifying rush that has not yet left her veins.  
  
Stiles starts, “Wh – ” but Lydia pulls him closer – almost throws him off again when the movement of her shoulders yawns, awful and searing, into her throat – and swallows his words. He jerks under her, inadvertently bumps into the wound on her neck, and she bites his lip through the pain, not any part of her willing to let go. He groans into her mouth.  
  
When she pulls away, his lips are wet with blood and spit. Warmth pools low in her belly as she studies him: he looks as if he has been _ravished_ , his breaths echoing harshly against hers in the space between them, and then she is meeting him halfway, feels the way the smallest sound escapes from his mouth into hers, coiled and helpless and _all want_.  
  
“Lydia,” Stiles begs, finally. She feels his hands twitch where they are resting on her knees, the thrumming of his knee as it shakes against the bed, and he grits out, “Lydia, wait – ”  
  
He gently nudges her away until she is at arm’s length, his hands sliding down to catch hers, squeezes them. There is a wild, pleading look to his eyes. “Can you – just. One moment. My god. Oh my god. Give me a moment before I end up killing us both. Your neck wound’s reopened.”  
  
So it has, and somehow the only disquiet this creates within Lydia is for the lull its presence demands. She sighs at her thoughts, carefully draws her hair back, and allows Stiles not only the moment but also his determination to substitute for Deaton. A part of her cannot help but be mortified with what has just transpired, by the strange, aching intimacy of it all, but mainly she studies the soft slope of his lashes and thinks that she would like to kiss him some more.  
  
Stiles glances briefly up from where he is poking – “ _redressing,_ ” said with some measurable offense – at her wound, only for his eyes to flit away just as quickly. The shape of his mouth twists into something of consternation and his fingers still, pressed gently against the back of her neck, the dimple of her collarbone. Lydia exchanges breathing for the constellations scattering his cheeks.  
  
After a long moment, he speaks. “Sometimes you’re so beautiful it scares me.” His words are so soft he might not have said anything at all, but then he is lifting his head and his eyes are clearer and louder than even the sun, bright enough to leave imprints of purpose behind her lids.  
  
And Lydia thinks that more than her kissing him, more than having him pressed so close to her, more than anything at all, she wants him to be like this always. Bright and effervescent and painfully, unbearably _alive_.

 

* * *

  
  
“You should rest, especially considering how you’ve recently been _stabbed in the throat_ ,” he says, stubborn. But she is stubborn in equal amounts _and_ she is injured _and_ he is aggravating her wound. He sighs, glowers disapprovingly.  
  
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” he says, but he is already acquiescing with every word.  
  
He tells her about how Scott had somehow shifted back into his human form and how the butcher’s son had been the one to reach out and break the ash circle. In the same moment Scott had roared, the lightning sphere surrounding them had faltered, only momentarily, but it had been enough for Stiles to aim his arrows without deflection. He tells her about the aftermath: no citizen fatalities – although there had been more than a few injuries to go around, physically and mentally – but how, as a whole, the citizens were coping astonishingly well. He tells her that Scott is coping well, too. Kira, Malia, Liam, too.  
  
“And me,” he adds, at her trenchant stare. All currently confined to bedrest – as prescribed by Deaton – until dawn. A smile lights the corner of his mouth. “I was sleeping when you awoke.”  
  
For one, shining moment, the events of the past day – _weeks_ – fade into obscurity. Lydia finds herself searching under his eyes for impossible signs of the shadows receding and she can only laugh at herself, relief rushing as high as the tides. Thank goodness, she thinks, thank god, and in some great feat of resistance, she does not catch his face between her hands, his mouth with hers.  
  
She only smiles back and pats at her lap with her uninjured hand. In this moment, she does not care about Theo or any doctors or the claws of fate sinking deeper into their necks. She just wants the sallow sheen encircling his eyes to disappear. _Sleep, sleep again,_ she mouths silently, and a part of her wonders what it would feel like, to have his breath ghosting over the words it had sired.  
  
This time Stiles is the one to close the distance between them. When he pulls back, it is to check her bandages for any spotting and to make a face. His thumbs brush along her cheeks.  
  
“Away from me, temptress,” he tells her, even as he is leaning in closer.  
  
A laugh _does_ escapes her then – a painful, choking thing – and she makes a face back at him.

 

* * *

  
  
_Your Majesty,  
  
It is in accordance with your undisputed capability as Sovereign and Protector of your loyal servants that we write this letter to you, beseeching your Gentle aid.  
  
On this day, the eleventh of the eleventh month, our village of Lozère-in-the-Mont has experienced what is undeniably the most terrible encounter in our humble history, to a beast of no natural origins. This creature was first reported to have entered through the fields of one Master Cornish at a little past the twelfth hour, subsequently disposing of him, his wife, and two of three children before heading northwest into the main village. The remaining child – a boy of no older than ten – was able to abscond to safety and, indeed, was the one to later report of this incidence. His and consequent recounts overlap in their provided detail: all describing a monstrous shape taller than two thatch houses, neither solid nor immaterial, but caught somewhere in between – solid enough to slice through flesh and bone and incorporeal enough to absorb any retaliation. Its attack was reported to last a total of half an hour and, afterward, it was seen heading northbound.  
  
Of the one-hundred and twelve inhabitants belonging to this village, nearly forty have expressed being injured – nineteen, severely so – and there has been a count of six-and-thirty deaths, which are listed below..._

 

* * *

  
  
A red meeting is called and the pack convenes in the war room an hour past dawn, fresh and _human_.  
  
As Lydia enters, a cry echoes sharply from across the marble hall calling her name, and then Kira is crashing into her, a cloud of dark, rosewater hair settling around them both. The girl squeezes Lydia so tightly she thinks she sees stars – only to loosen her grip when Stiles says, “ _Hey,_ watch it, Heracles” – “Sorry, _sorry_ , I forgot” –  
  
Malia approaches them at a much more sedated pace, says, “Hi Lydia,” and a wide, tooth-filled smile lights her face when Lydia reaches out to ensconce her into the embrace. Whereas Kira is saccharine, Malia is bluntness and sandalwood, and Lydia soaks them both in with a near feral devotion.  
  
_My friends,_ she thinks in that moment, only to be startled by both the thought and the want for it to be true. Friend. A term she has only ever defined by soft memories and darker curls – only ever by _Alli_ – but – this. This upsurge of affection both strange and familiar, this sharp-scented joy that pricks at her heart. This is it, too, isn’t it?  
  
And Allison had spoken of it, when Lydia had been lost in her mind. Deaton had mentioned it not two days prior: Lydia was part of a pack now, wasn’t she? And where this thought had once petrified her, now it only seeps warm into her bones.  
  
_You are a fool._  She looks past both girls’ shoulders to where Stiles has both hands on the shoulders of a bashful, ornery Liam, rocking him back and forth as he talks to Scott.  
  
Thinks back to herself, _So I am._

 

* * *

  
  
When they are all seated, Scott says, “Deaton has advised me on his current theories – ”  
  
Liam frowns, says, “When?”  
  
“Last night, when we – well, most of us – were asleep.”  
  
It is Malia’s turn to frown. “Why didn’t he wait until we were all awake, to tell us?” she asks.  
  
“Because _he’s_ asleep now.”  
  
Malia, again. “Well, why didn’t he sleep at the same time we were sleeping?”  
  
“Because he was too busy making sure we didn’t end up sleeping permanently.”  
  
Here, Stiles makes a point to say, “I don’t remember being invited and _I_ wasn’t sleeping,” which provokes Liam into making a point to _ask,_ “What were you doing, then?”  
  
The curl Stiles allows his mouth to sink into is _nothing_ if not goading, and Lydia nearly stands up from her seat, nearest inkpot in hand. “Something little boys shouldn’t be asking about,” and Lydia groans.  
  
In the predictable aftermath following this statement, Kira – who sits to Lydia’s right – sighs and slouches in her chair, slants over a look as if to say, _if anything,_ this _makes me want to sleep permanently._ Lydia does not disagree.  
  
In the end, it takes the sovereign king five tries in order to effectively calm the masses. Scott rubs at his forehead, sighs for the fifteenth time, and glares when Stiles attempts to open his mouth again.  
  
“I could have you all killed for insubordination,” he says.  
  
“Insubordination? Never, my king.”  
  
The only response Scott allows himself is delivered to the rest of the room. “It is good that we’ve all recovered our full senses. The fullest we are individually capable of, anyway,” and an indignant noise bleats from where Stiles is sitting. Scott magnanimously ignores this, continues, “As I was mentioning, Deaton has what he thinks is a plausible explanation for why we have so abruptly recovered from our, er – ”  
  
“Curse?” Kira supplies.  
  
“Yes,” Scott agrees. “A complication that, at least for now, seems to be latent. In fact, Deaton has reason to believe the reversal won't just be transitory.” He spreads out several scrolls so that they line up side-by-side atop the marbled table.  
  
“These arrived before the last watch ended, by guild-trade falcons.” That is, avians designated only for wars or invasions due to their unrivaled speed. “They detail attacks of an unknown monstrosity through several villages in the southlands. Judging by the time stamps provided – the first documented sometime past noon in Lozère-in-the-Mont – then, Clarke, Haberland, Graeme” – Scott places a corresponding marker on the table map for each of these names –  “we can assume that these attacks are – ”  
  
“Heading toward us.” The color leeches from Liam’s face until he is both trembling and white-lipped when he says, “Mason.”  
  
“Or what has become of him,” Scott says, gentle, and Liam pushes away from the table – as if about to storm out – only to tuck his feet up onto the seat and fold in on himself, so small in that chair. Lydia’s throat constricts at the sight. _No,_ she thinks. _There must be some way._  
  
“There has to be some part of him still there,” Stiles voices aloud. “The beast was dormant inside Mason for all that time, why can’t Mason do the same?”  
  
A smile equal parts fondness and exasperation lifts Scott’s mouth. “If you would allow me more than a few moments’ time to speak, you’d know that yes, this is what Deaton thinks as well.”  
  
Liam’s eyes peek over from where he has buried his head in his forearms.  
  
Scott reaches over to rub at Liam’s head, recites the words Deaton had told him: “‘Life is energy, and energy does not simply disappear,’ other broken rules notwithstanding. So,” he says, “some part of Mason – no matter how infinitesimal – must still exist.”  
  
“Oh, good,” says Malia. “When do we attack?”  
  
“What?” Scott says. “Er. Well – ”  
  
“We _are_ fighting, aren’t we?” she demands.  
  
“We are,” Scott concedes slowly. “We’ll have to. But it will only be against the beast and that requires another strategy altogether. Why don’t you all,” he says louder, when nearly all of his pack begins talking over each other, “let me explain, first. Mercy. Even the _elders_ don’t talk this much.”  
  
“Because they’re too busy plotting your demise,” Stiles points out, and Scott muses, “Ye-ah,” before sharpening his glare.  
  
“Please,” he begs. “ _Stop talking._ If any of you would _listen_ : Deaton believes the Dread Doctors to have been killed by the beast.”  
  
In the stunned silence that follows, Scott continues, now looking appropriately mollified, “The beast inside Mason, if we are correct in our assumptions, should be _la bete du Gevaudan_. You all should be familiar with it: the infamous creature of legend, the most savage, merciless werewolf ever to ravage this kingdom, etcetera. In other words,” he continues, “if it were to have fully taken over Mason, there would be most likely no room inside it for affection – not even for its resurrectors. ‘The beast belongs to no man – ancient or not’ – and, more than likely, it would have wanted to impart this knowledge on its benefactors. Moreover, why are we so desperate to locate the Dread Doctors?”  
  
Stiles says, “Oh, so _now_ we’re allowed to speak. Because they’re homicidal madmen who revel in the blood of their victims.”  
  
“Also because it was the only way to fully regain our human conscience,” Kira adds.  
  
Scott inclines his head, says, “Through the locating and burning of the parent cluster. And yet.”  
  
“Yet, here we are,” Liam finishes, slowly. “Both human and conscious.”  
  
“Human and conscious even when it is _past dusk_ ,” Malia reminds.  
  
The smile that widens across Scott’s face then is strangely reminiscent of a mother hen preening, and an unanticipated rush of fondness fills Lydia’s veins. She thinks of Stiles, Allison, how every member of this sundry group would follow him to the ends of the earth without question; thinks, _this is a king I would die for_. This one, standing in his war room half-dressed and half-human, his only adornment found in the gleam of his eyes.  
  
Doubt and relief grapple for purchase in Liam’s expression when he ventures, “What if this is all some trick? A fluke.”  
  
“We’ll see tonight, at any rate,” Scott answers. “But for now, while we’re able, we should plan ahead.”  
  
“Maybe they’ve gone into hibernation, what with winter approaching,” Stiles suggests belatedly, as he reads through one of the urgent letters.  
  
Lydia thinks Scott’s eyes may fall clean from his head, the force with which he is rolling them. “No, Stiles, I’m reasonably certain that is not the case.”  
  
But Stiles is glancing up again and there is none of the carelessness that underlay his previous words – only a dim, bitter twisting of his eyes and mouth, and Lydia cannot help but imagine the accounts he must have read within those letters. “We can’t let it reach the capital,” are his only words.  
  
“No,” the king agrees heavily because he, too, has read the scrolls. “We can’t.”  
  
Kira and Malia exchange brief glances before Malia, who is closer, reaches out and touches Scott’s shoulder, says, “I’ll issue an evacuation, then?”  
  
“Please. Also, orders to deploy immediate aid to the villages attacked.” There is a calculating manner in which Scott runs his hand over the embellished glossing of a map, over the marked villages and the stretch of land that remains between the beast and the capital. He says, “We’ll need to intercept the beast halfway. As far away from the city as we can, without compromising any more settlements than is necessary.”  
  
“I’ll compile a list of vulnerable settlements and notify them promptly,” Kira assures, already pulling a spare map toward her.  
  
“What time estimate should I give the capital,” Malia is saying then as she rises to leave, and Scott says, “Er, roughly around two days, to be safe – the ‘maticians are still looking it over – ” and the others are too busy glossing over potential battlegrounds and casualties, so it is Lydia who reaches for the map Scott had marked earlier, a spare leaf of parchment, and some ink. The numbers and rearrangements flow through her head, clear and concise, coming back to her as easily as when grandmother had allowed her to keep the books, but Lydia still remembers to pause at the end to assess her work. Satisfied, she circles her calculations, writes beside it, _projected time of arrival is within 3 days : 4 hours – rough window of 2 hours in either direction,_ and slides the paper toward Scott and Malia.  
  
For a long moment, Scott stares down at the paper. Then he is lifting that stare onto Lydia, his mouth halfway parted, leaving Malia the only one who has the grace to look increasingly scandalized by this blatant demonstration of mathematics.  
  
“Three days and four hours?” Malia confirms impatiently with Scott, who replies, “Um – yes, I suppose. Um.”  
  
Malia grins then, all sharp teeth and amusement. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she tells Lydia. “As if we needed another reason to keep you forever.”  
  
Lydia does not bother to compose herself, flushes pink with pleasure.

 

* * *

  
  
In hindsight, she knew it was to happen. From the moment the pattern of the beast became clear, Lydia knew. When the others had fell to the various maps in search of a place, Lydia alone sat with her hands white-knuckled in her lap and knew.  
  
Knowing does not ease the dread that sloshes, heavy, in her stomach. It does not ease the terror that flies through her, blinding and almost nostalgic, when it is ultimately Stiles who says, “I’ve found it.” He holds up his map and points, triumphant.  
  
Malia, having returned from the aviary, says only, “Oh. We’ve been there,” and looks at Lydia.  
  
“You have?” Stiles says, also looking at Lydia.  
  
“Picking wildflowers. There is a large clearing, lots of flowers to pick – and rabbits,” Malia says, with a decidedly more appreciative look.  
  
Liam is looking as though it is physically impossible for him to imagine Lydia and Malia picking wildflowers separately, much less together. Nevertheless, he turns to Scott and says, “Should they spearhead, then?” which causes Stiles to look sharply at him and Malia to straighten like a hound that has scented prey.  
  
Scott’s gaze flickers over to where a quiet storm is gathering on his closest friend’s face. After a long moment, he says slowly, “If they’d like. Malia, Lydia?”  
  
“Scott,” Stiles says, then.  
  
“ _Yes,_ ” Malia says, adds, “please.”  
  
“ _Ly –_ “ Stiles begins only for the sound to fall short, an arrow that has lost its incentive, and when Lydia catches glimpse of his expression, she knows it is because he had stopped breathing in that moment. She knows that beneath his still, careful exterior is a storm boiling over in violent, nauseating waves. She knows, because it is the same terror that lives scant inches beneath her own.  
  
_No,_ Lydia thinks and shakes her head at Scott.  
  
_No,_ she thinks again and smiles gently at Stiles because she will give him this, at least.  
  
Spearheading wouldn’t fit in her plan, at all.

 

* * *

  
  
The wind begins to blow warmer and drier, heralding the death of autumn and the arrival of the eleventh month. Grace weather, it is called, because it is anything but and humans have always been eager to outwardly appease that which they fear. It is a time for madness and wildfires and ill omens, a harbinger of darker, shorter days.  
  
It is the month, they say, of oracles.

 

* * *

 

Two days later, when the scratches on her arm are beginning to close and her throat hurts less with every swallow, every word, Stiles finds her looking out over the crenels – the same spot she had been when she had grasped desperately for Scott’s thread.  
  
“Hey,” and she feels his hand brief and warm against the curve of her elbow. When she lifts her head, he is staring at her in that way he does sometimes, when he is thinking about her but at himself, only for his eyes to clear themselves a moment later. A small, reflexive smile lightens his face and he says, “Sorry. I just – well. I wanted to say sorry.”  
  
When her only reply is to blink in bemusement, his tongue presses briefly against the corner of his mouth before he elaborates, “For not being the most in control of myself back at the meeting. It’s just that” – and here he shrugs, affably, helplessly – “I’ve recently grown slightly more perturbed at my general lack of competence. Eichen. Theo. But that’s my personal demon; I shouldn’t have pushed you.”  
  
She touches his open wrist, if only to feel the warmth of his pulse beneath her fingertips. “Do you think I would have allowed you to hinder me, had I wanted to go?” and this is a statement she is only beginning to understand the depths of: how easy it would have been, to leave. That there would had been no true reason to stay past the first few nights, to keep latching on to hope after hope, if she truly had wanted to leave. “I don’t want to spearhead, Stiles.”  
  
“No,” he says, and his fingers curl up to briefly squeeze hers. “But I wanted to apologize anyway.”  
  
“Thank you," she tells him, and then, with the intent to lighten his expression and for lack of anything better: "Are we airing out linens?”  
  
“No,” he says. “Not if you don’t want. Whatever you want.”  
  
She laughs, then – at the earnest and equally hesitant expression she has seen on too many husbands. Gentler, she tells him, “It’s all right, Stiles. I worry about you, too.”  
  
His hand finds hers again and does not let go, this time. “Do you?”  
  
“Yes.” _All my life,_ and she thinks about what Allison had said in the void. I think we cannot help but worry, when it is someone we –  
  
Her throat closes. _Love.  
_  
He smiles at her, shy and boyish charm and says, “Oh, we _are_ airing our dirty linens then.”  
  
“That was hardly dirty,” she informs him. “I am now under the impression that you cannot truly handle it.”  
  
“Try me,” he says, all earnest eyes and tone, but she sees that imprint of amusement tucking itself into the corners of his mouth and the words slip from her: “I know you, Stiles Stilinski. You just want me to keep talking, don’t you?”  
  
He smiles. “You do know me. Though,” he adds modestly, “I’ve been told by many that my face is an open book.”  
  
“A blank one, too,” she says in awe, and he makes a grab for her.  
  
She dodges, wrenches her hand from his and snaps, “I’m still _injured_ , you clown,” but her face is smiling so widely it _hurts_ – everything hurts in this moment, bright and unfettered and temporal beneath the cooling autumn sun.  
  
Stiles nevertheless heeds her words, is careful not to brush against her neck or arm. Instead, his thumbs rest on the corners of her mouth, pressing against the indents of her cheeks, and he looks at her and says, “How long has it been, Lydia? I feel like there is no one in the world I want to get known to more than you.”

He places his heart before her as easily as if it does not cost him the apprehension tightening his eyes - every facet, every chamber bared to her in sunlight, relentless and willing, caustic and vulnerable, arrogant and loyal to a fault. In this moment, he seems to be saying, _I'll be all these things and more - I would be yours, if you'd have me,_  and Lydia thinks of this heart that has been washed ashore, of the ebb and flow of tides. The give and take of the moon. And so she places her hands over his and lowers them, begins, "You can ask, if you want," only to lick her lips, unsure of what to say.

At length, she tells him, “I will not guarantee any answers either of us will be satisfied with, but I – ”

 _I want to slowly begin my part in mending the distance that remains between us. I want to be someone whom neither of us will regret.  
_  
“Thank you for being so patient with me,” she says, at last. “I know it is not your forte,” and Stiles does not say, _patient with what?_ He only says, “It’s easy when it’s you, Lydia,” and her heart is a chalice overflowing, pooling warm and syrupy into her stomach.  
  
Lydia ducks her head, studies their hands – the tendons and veins of his larger ones entangled with hers, the dark hair and darker spots that dust over his wrists and forearms, how she wants to press every part of him to her mouth and never let go. She feels the soft rustling of wind that purls around her ankles, waits for the inevitable storm to gather its clouds.  
  
Stiles says, slowly, “You knew who we were the entire time, didn’t you?” _Who I was_.  
  
_Yes._ Lydia bites the inside corner of her lower lip until she is strong enough to gently detangle his hands from hers, watches for the moment his fingers curl in on themselves and speaks aloud, “Yes.”  
  
“Why – ” he pauses. “Why didn’t you tell us?”  
  
“I couldn’t tell anything,” she reminds, and ah, _this_ is the opening he wedges his foot into even as the door is swinging closed, asks, blunt and relentless, “Couldn’t or didn’t want to?”  
  
For a long and terrible silence, Lydia cannot stare higher than the rising and falling of his throat, his words prickling over her skin like the tiny gnats that would nibble relentlessly around her every summer in the fields. Then, she is lifting her head to meet his gaze.  
  
She sees the moment the skin around Stiles’ eyes tighten with realization, the way his dark centers read her as easily as a weathervane reads the wind. He inhales through his mouth and not one inch of him has moved but it is suddenly as if he has taken a blatant step backwards, the kind of step you cannot breach with distance alone –  
  
“Because,” he is saying then, aloud for both of them, slowly, _dreadfully,_ “you did not want to be my soulmate.”  
  
Many times, an event is neither as terrible nor as pleasing as the mind would have you forecast. Other times, however, it is every bit as terrible and tremendous as you have ever imagined, and worse still. This is, Lydia thinks, one of those times. Her hands press into her dress hard enough to wrinkle and she thinks angrily that mercy, mercy, if she cannot even breathe through this, how will she through anything else to come?  
  
 “No,” she corrects him, and her voice does not shake. Her hands do not reach out of their own accord to pull him back from where he has widened the gap between them. “Because I did not want you to be mine.”  
  
She says, “No one should be my soulmate, Stiles,” and his voice when he asks, “ _Why,_ Lydia,” is more terrible than if he had shouted.  
  
Lydia gives in now, reaches out to where _You_ – peeks out from beneath his shirt, the words – _hers_ – stark and iridescent and still puckered red beneath his collarbone. She brushes her thumb across it and feels as his skin pebbles under her touch, and she says much too lightly, “I think you’ve all forgotten who I am. The reason why my village feared my family, why this kingdom has long feared my kind. I didn’t want to bring regret into the lives of those I love. Least of all, you.”

"There is no less truth to what I said the other day," she says, because if nothing else, she needs him to understand this. "I have regretted the hand of fate, but I have never regretted you, Stiles."  
  
Stiles is biting down his lower lip so hard she thinks it may bleed and his head tips back, regards the heavens as if asking for a patience he cannot afford. Finally, still addressing the sky, he says, “Ah. You think I want a life in the suburbs with a wife who will spend her time darning socks and baking biscuits that _aren’t_ analogous to rocks, whose uncanniest trait will be her saintly disposition.”  
  
“No,” she says, “but at least not me,” and a small, choked sound escapes from Stiles’ chest as if he is drowning offshore, too far away for his pleas to be heard.  
  
He tells her, “All I want is you.”  
  
He tells her, amused and yearning and self-deprecating all at once, “Did you know that before you even said my words, I dreamed about you being my soulmate? I’ve ever only wanted you, Lydia.”  
  
She stares at him, horrified, and “ _Why,_ ” the word falling from her.  
  
“Why,” he repeats, and tilts his head to regard her, a strange, near gentle expression tucking itself into the corner of his mouth. He says, “Do you know how smart you are, Lydia?”  
  
He does not give her room to either consider this or reply, his words merciless in their intent to make her understand. “Did you ever realize how you never needed to speak even once, to make yourself understood? I did. Have you ever seen the expression on your face when you are listening or reading, how effortlessly you take things into stride, how quickly you process information? I have. Did you know that every time we ran ourselves into a ditch, Allison would say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll ask Elle’?”  
  
Stiles says, “Did you think I wouldn’t know that it was you who wrote to Allison about the meaning of the scroll, who solved the final piece of the puzzle and  _saved my life_ , even when you were a thousand miles away? Because I do. And this was all _before_ you came to the citadel.”  
  
He says, again, “You saved my life. That’s twice now.”

 

* * *

 

She is sitting alone in the war room when Scott finds her, the words of her book blurring in front of her. Today, he is wearing a simple, short-sleeved tunic – decidedly unkingly, complete with the straws sticking from his hair –and she can clearly see the dark band of ink encircling his upper left arm. She looks away hastily, her heart pounding.  
  
When Scott notices her, he grinds to a halt, says, “Oh! _No,_ ” and if that does not have Lydia standing up from her seat then she is not nearly half as keen as Stiles had made her out to be. The subsequent alarm that crosses Scott’s face is near comical.  
  
“No!” he blurts again, wide-eyed and penitent. “No, stay, please. Uh. It’s only – ” He plucks at his shirt, grimaces.  
  
“Sorry if I smell of manure,” he says and grimaces again. “I was sparring with Liam and slipped into a mud puddle that um, did not turn out to be only a mud puddle. I would have drawn a bath first, but it helps ward off wayward councilmen and, well, I didn’t expect – ” He gestures helplessly at her, at the space around them.  
  
Lydia, who has smelled worse things than manure, says sincerely, “I don’t mind,” only for Scott to look as if he mildly and completely disagrees with her.  
  
But he only says “Well,” and sidles into a seat as far away from Lydia as he can without seeming impolite, “um, I will just be looking through some maps for when the beast arrives.”  
  
For a while, they work in compatible silence – Scott with his maps, muttering to himself, and Lydia reading through the 'L' section of  _Historia_. But soon Lydia’s fingers are scraping against each other, her crossed legs jiggling, and it is a rare day indeed when Lydia of Martin begins a conversation, but she does now, the words bursting from her chest: “Scott” – and when he looks up, startled –  “Your Highness. Thank you for your generosity,” she says.  
  
He makes a pained face at her in a way that reveals his understanding. “Please, don’t – both the appreciation and that title. Not when it is the least I could have done, Lydia.”  
  
“No,” she disagrees, “that isn’t true. There is a lot less you could have done,” and a small smile ticks up the corner of his mouth. He says, “Well, then. Thank _you_ for your hospitality as well – both in Martin and over the years – and,” he is truly smiling now, “for having been the light of Allison’s life.”  
  
“Oh, no,” Lydia is saying then, swallowing around a stone in her throat as large as the ocean, “no, Scott. You should have seen how she talked about you.”  
  
Scott laughs. “You should have seen how she talked about _you_.”  
  
“You should see how she still talks about you,” Lydia says, and Scott is no longer laughing. There is a huge, vast hurt to his eyes – the same look he had given her when he’d found her letters – as if he is afraid to remember, and so Lydia smiles as gently as she knows how, says, “She – Allison. She came to visit me, before you arrived at Eichen. To keep me sane, to teach me how to fight. She saved me in that way and, before I left, she wanted me to remind you of how much she still loves you. She said, because you are – ”  
  
“ – a little forgetful sometimes,” Scott finishes, smiling so brightly it hurts her to see. For a long moment, the boy-king only stands there and smiles, so huge and so happy and so _content_ that the ache in Lydia’s throat grows only wider until all she wants is for this gladness to follow him, now and always.  
  
“I know,” he says, quiet and tender, eyes glancing off as if he is speaking to someone far away. Then his gaze refocuses onto Lydia and he tells her, “It still hurts, you know. Every day,” because despite his milder disposition, he can be just as astute as his best friend and he sees the unspoken question that has been lingering in her eyes. “I don’t think it will ever stop hurting.”  
  
And even now, Lydia finds herself struggling with the art of comforting another. But unlike when she had poured water down Stiles’ shirt, this Lydia is more willing to try – desperate to – and so she says, “But perhaps with time, this hurt – your – _our_ – hurt will only become a shining memory. Not unlike,” she struggles, “not unlike a bright cloud above us to gaze at no matter the season.”  
  
Scott laughs. “Oh, no. Where did you hear that from?” and, what with the days cooling rapidly, she does not believe the room to have abruptly grown as hot as her cheeks would have her believe.  
  
“Allison,” she mumbles, and Scott laughs in earnest now.  
  
He says, hiccupping, “That was inscribed on the back of a box I bought her once, from a business trip to Lahey. The _actual_ gift was a comb, but it also came with a personal er, pearl of wisdom from the seller who was a self-proclaimed part-time poet. It was terrible. She loved it, of course.”  
  
‘Pearl of wisdom’ and suddenly Lydia is sitting up straighter, saying, “A whalebone comb with mother-of-pearl?”  
  
Scott blinks at her, surprised. “Yes. Did she ever tell you?”  
  
“When I first saw her inside the void, she was combing her hair,” and she does not need to say more than that. Lydia perches her chin in her hands, feels her own smile lifting her cheeks as she watches that look of speechless, wistful joy spread across his face once more.  
  
After a long moment, as if confiding an unsure truth, Scott tells her, “I was planning on getting her another one for her anniversary.”  
  
Lydia stills, feels the smile slipping from her face. A part of her mind had always been paying attention: the shortening days, the blustering winds dropping degree by degree, the falling leaves and crisper night air. Soon, snow will be blowing at their heels – gently, at first, then nipping like cold, starving hounds, and – it’s soon isn’t it? Allison’s anniversary.  
  
Scott says yes, it is, and if someone were to have told Lydia even a month ago, she would have suffered for days at a time, disbelieving, as bleak as the winter solstice. Now with Scott sitting across from her, she remembers Allison’s dimples and kindness and thinks that if time does not heal, then maybe it will warm these memories enough to ward off the cold riming their hearts. Thinks that perhaps it has begun its work already.  
  
Scott must interpret her silence as confusion, because he is then explaining, “The gift – it’s something Stiles does for his mother every year. His initial excuse was that flowers were boring, but I think it was his own way of coping with the pain and, somewhere along the line, it became tradition.”  
  
Lydia imagines a Stiles younger and just as precocious, leaving his mother gifts year after year – of Stiles, older, who still does this, secretly, willingly; of Scott, who joins him – and a piece breaks from her chest, sweet and aching.  
  
She says then, firmly and with no room for doubt, “I think a comb would be lovely,” and is rewarded with a grin.  
  
“I’m glad you are Stiles’ soulmate,” Scott confides in her, unbearably shy and unbearably stout in loyalty to his oldest friend. “He told me that you were there with him when he had his fit. Believe it or not, he  _can_ get embarrassed and he was more than that when he told me. He worried about how strange it must have seemed to you – for him to react so strongly over what others would term a minor detail. But his mother had died of poisoning and it was on the day of her funeral that he had his first fit.”  
  
Scott tells Lydia about how, after Claudia Stilinski’s death, neither her husband nor son were ever the same for a long time – but especially Stiles. “Not even nine years of age, and I think it hurt him incredibly; not only his own pain, but seeing how deeply his father was affected,” Scott says. “Stiles had always yearned to emulate his parents' relationship but, for a long time after his mother's death, he told me that he never wanted to meet his soulmate. Or, alternatively, that he wanted to meet whoever it was and lock them up in a gilded tower, where neither human nor death could ever touch them.” A rueful laugh escapes Scott, then, and he absently runs a hand through his hair as if it is a muscle memory associated with what he is remembering, says, “It’s easy to think like this when your soulmate is only as real as the unsubstantiated words on your skin. But then Stiles met _you,_ and undoubtedly he realized that nothing can ever prepare someone for the real thing.”  
  
Scott grins suddenly, as if saying this has led to another memory, and there is a muted undertone of amusement when he says, “I think his favorite color may be red now, whether he likes it or not – but,” and here his eyes drop fleetingly to the braid thrown carelessly over Lydia’s shoulder, “as his best friend, I have good reason to believe it’s the former.”

 

* * *

  
  
(Later, when she is brave enough, she will ask Stiles, “Will I always miss her this much?”  
  
“Every day,” he will answer, because there are things you cannot lie about, and this truth settles on Lydia’s shoulders, a weight so profound it is nearly bittersweet.)

 

* * *

 

 **X. Kiffa**  
_If you lift your head, you will see_  
_There, a path I have left through the heavens_  
_From rock I have carved kingdoms, from tides, oceans_  
_I have waited twelve thousand years_  
_My love, I am willing to wait twelve thousand more_

 

* * *

  
  
In the end, it is when Lydia is alone in her room that evening, filled up with warmth and stories and words to ponder, that revelation visits her. She lies on the bed, thinking about what Scott had told her before they parted ways.  
  
“Lydia,” and he had looked at the bandages around her neck and arm, a worry and stutter coating his next words, and in that instant Lydia had seen a seventeen-year old boy still learning the tongue of diplomats, “we’ll always appreciate what you’ve sacrificed – what you’ve gone through with us, for us. But you should never feel obligated to help us, whether because of your abilities or because of Allison.”  
  
And Lydia had not known how to reply. Part of her had longed to take offense at his words; to comment that she had never felt obligated, that she knew better than to be tied down to ocean rocks, but she could not. If she admitted to herself – as she does now in this room – there had always been that undercurrent of obligation in the beginning. She had only ever been a symbol of death from a small, forgotten village – what had she to offer, what had she to honor, besides her memory of Allison?  
  
But somehow, somewhere, along the way there had been a turn in the tides and Lydia had found herself being swept along without even realizing her change in direction. Allison’s memory had still been there, but where Allison and her aristocratic friends had once been intertwined – with Lydia inexplicably reminded of Allison every time she had looked into their faces – a strange overlay now exists, as if the sun has come out from behind the clouds, separating man from shadow without disrupting their symbiotic relationship.  
  
But Lydia, in that war room with Scott, had not been able to parse out the words from the lump in her throat, and so she had said nothing at all.  
  
Lydia, now, tries the words out loud: rolling them across her teeth, tasting for any relics of bitterness. She does not find any. In the insulated quiet of her bedroom, Lydia says, “I still want to,” and only when spoken aloud does she realize the extent to which she means it.

 

* * *

  
  
The problem, however, is this: that the Dread Doctors were dead – well, presumably.  
  
She corrects herself a moment later. Not so much a problem as a reason to reconsider. After all, she had followed them this far with the intention of using her screams to paralyze the Doctors long enough that the others could dispatch of them. The Doctors had been prone to vibrations, as explained by Deaton, and screams themselves were essentially vibrations. There is no guarantee that her ability will have a similar – if _any_ – effect on the beast of Gevaudan. From what Deaton and Scott have mentioned, it does not seem to be affected by vibrations at all.  
  
Lydia, who had been lying on her back, now rolls onto her front in a moment of frustration, presses her forehead against her covers. She is not supernaturally endowed with strength like the others, but she _does_ have an ability, albeit it is mainly suitable for –  
  
Lydia nearly rolls off her bed.  
  
In the next moment, she is scrambling upward, sitting with her legs tucked neatly beneath her, torso ramrod straight and clutching the nearest pillow to her chest. She stares unseeingly at her writing desk because _of course_ – of course, she thinks, leaping to her feet so that her bedspread bounces beneath her, _of course,_ and a strange jubilance is rushing through her veins.  
  
Mason, as the others believed, was still somewhere inside the beast. A tiny, infinitesimal presence without a body, dormant and _close to death_. Morbidly, Lydia thinks that she has never been this happy to think of anyone dying. But if this is the case, then couldn’t she sift through the void and find him – pull him out?  
  
The new problem would be that last part – bringing him back with her. She had never managed to do anything of the sort before, in her time with Valack – such an ability was useless for him to explore; he had only wanted her as a bloodhound. But in the same way she can clearly separate dreams from visions, Lydia knows in her bones that this is not impossible. She knows, from the voices that rush toward her every time she enters the void – desperate and lost, lingering at the edges of death, and how violently they seek an audience, a host. The key then, she thinks, is to carefully capture Mason’s essence without being lost to him in return; a task that would seem more feasible the weaker his state.  
  
Lydia drops back down so she is sitting on her bed again. She rests her chin atop the pillow and she thinks of Scott and his pack, of Liam, all of them trying so hard to rescue their friend. She thinks of Scott, who genuinely, fervently loves this kingdom – who has suffered loss after loss, and has never yet lost that goodness in his eyes. She thinks of Stiles, who had wanted to shelf her on some glass pedestal, far away from danger, but who had let her prance out into the open square with nary but an inkling and her own will, who had made it explicit that he would not be one to force his opinions on her.  
  
You see, her grandmother had always tread so carefully – had made it certain that the same belief was instilled within Lydia – but in the end it did not leave Lorraine of Martin with any less regrets. And a part of Lydia has long realized that she cannot ever dissuade Stiles from joining the battle to come – neither with words nor actions. But there is still the option of choice – _hers_ – and in this moment she makes it.  
  
Maybe it is time to rock the boat, to not be so afraid of getting wet. To curl her toes into the sand and meet the incoming tides.  
  
“I think,” Lydia says aloud, “it is time I learned to swim.”

 

* * *

 

This is, in hindsight, around the time Lydia first sees the glint, flashing from within the cane that has been lying innocuously on her writing desk.

 

* * *

* * *

  
  
Deaton has fallen asleep for perhaps a mere quarter of an hour before he wakes up to a pounding on his door. He unlocks the latch, only to be blown back by a tempestuous cloud of red curls storming into his infirmary.  
  
_Lydia,_ he recognizes blearily, even as she is thrusting a weighty wooden object into his hands. Lydia and her cane, and then the girl is unfolding a note, holding it beneath his nose.  
  
“Cane cracked – hit a chimera with it – ” she explains, breathless from exertion, the paper shaking in her hand, “This was inside – ”  
  
It reads:

_The legacy of Marie-Jeanne Valet, famed ancestor of the Argents, who forged her line with blood, earth, and the tip of the sun’s spear, by the grace of the moon._

 

* * *

* * *

 

 **XI. Antares**  
_My love, I tasted you with every breath_  
_Relentless with words you entrusted_  
_And as sharp as quills dipped into ink_  
_I would burn kingdoms for you_  
_That you would live forever_

 

* * *

  
  
The day the beast of Gevaudan arrives, the falcons and the dead proclaim its advent, so loud that Lydia can hardly hear.  
  
“It has stayed true to its course,” is all Scott says from the war room upon reading the messages, and the stronghold bursts into heightened activity. Guards saddle and gallop out in neat, parallel lines toward both the capital and the meadow south of it, where Lydia and Malia had once spent an afternoon gathering wildflowers. Malia, who now spearheads the front lines, fearless and armorless in equal measures.  
  
Scott had addressed the guards before they had left, had ordered them to keep their positions in and around the capital, steering clear from the point of crossfire. “Your duty, as soldiers to the dominion,” he had said, “is to protect our citizens. My duty, as king, is to make it so that you can,” and in Scott’s hand was what remained of Lydia’s cane – a pike, sharp and gleaming in the sunlight. The legacy of the Argents, who had both exposed and destroyed the beast countless centuries ago. Deaton had swept Lydia up into a hug that day when he had realized what she had brought him, at the expense of Stiles’ spurious wrath.  
  
“You are,” Deaton had said, “a considerable game changer indeed, Lydia of Martin.”

 

* * *

 

Theo, of course, waits for them at the point of intersection – a mask of indifference and calm that cannot quite hide the agitation itching beneath his skin. There is something different about him today: the way his hair does not quite fall back perfectly, the stench of death that has magnified with the blue streaks that chase each other across his fingers, the markings that ripple across his face.  
  
“Go away,” Stiles snarls upon seeing him. “If you haven’t noticed, we’re a little busy.”  
  
 “If you haven’t noticed, so am I. Rather, so _have_ I been,” Theo answers easily enough. “Mercy, haven’t you ever wondered why the Doctors would curse any of you to begin with? _You,_ who are hardly worthy enough to have stuck to the soles of their shoes.”  
  
The smile that spreads across his face is a premonition Lydia does not need to be having but there it is: the telltale prickling of trouble that raises the hairs on the back of her neck. Theo does not disappoint.  
  
He says, “Because I asked them to,” and in the far distance comes a dark, ominous rumbling. “I, who was their original creation, their masterpiece, their _perfect son_. Until they decided one day that true evil could not be found in someone inherently evil, but rather in the corruption of someone inherently good. And just like that they took away my legacy – took away my right to inherit the beast – and gave it to some _useless human_ – which, look how they ended up because of it: _dead_ – so what could I do, but establish for myself a different legacy until I could finally reclaim what was rightfully mine – ”  
  
“Get back,” Scott is saying to the rest of them, his nose the best among them all, his eyes scanning the break of trees in front of them, “get back _now_ – ” and Theo is finishing kindly, “Don’t think too highly of yourselves. You were only a means to an end.”  
  
“An end you haven’t managed to fulfill,” Stiles points out while the supernatural among them – Scott, Kira, Malia, Liam – search the air, their eyes beginning to glow reflexively with impending danger. Stiles, however, never takes his eyes from the chimera, even as his hand reaches blindly to grasp Lydia’s, and she grips him back with the same strength, the solid warmth of his hand a balm upon the rabbit-like pace of her heartbeat.  
  
“No,” Theo replies and smiles. Lightning crackles hot and blinding across his body, scorch marks burning down his clothes. “Not yet.”  
  
His hands shoot out and a surge of lightning expels from him, emanating in every direction. Lydia pulls Stiles back in the same moment he does her – each equally unwilling to allow harm to come to the other – but it is Kira who calmly steps forward, hair rising behind her like a dark cloud. Kira, who thrusts her katana forward and catches every last drop of lightning that arcs toward the pack, as neatly as one would fold laundry into a basket.  
  
She says to Theo, “I think you’ve forgotten about my existence in your lust for Scott.”  
  
“I would _never_ dare to forget you, Lady Kira. You mustn’t think so lowly of yourself. Or,” Theo says, turning his head to study the sight behind him, “highly, for that matter” – because caught temporarily in a net of blue-streaked lightning is the beast of Gevaudan, its colossal mass having finally broken through the trees.  
  
The makeshift cage holds for only a split second more, but it is enough for Theo to breach the distance separating him and the beast, his talons and teeth elongated, another arc of lightning as forerunner and a roar splitting from his chest. The beast rises to meet him with a responding roar and Lydia nearly tumbles over in the aftershock that tears across the field when the two creatures collide. Her only anchor is Stiles who – she sees – has conveniently grabbed onto stoic, frowning Malia.  
  
When the dust clears, Theo and the beast are face-to-face: Theo, with his elongated, crackling talons buried into the space where the beast’s heart would be, and the beast with its own claws wrapped around Theo’s neck. For a long moment, not even the trees dare to whisper.  
  
Then, “You belong to _me_ ,” Theo hisses, the anger ripe in his eyes, and lightning rushes down his arm into his talons as he inserts them deeper into the beast.  
  
A harsh, leering laugh reverberates around them, low enough that Lydia feels as if her heart is about to beat itself out from her chest. The beast speaks, then – more an audible sentiment than words – says, “ _Weak_ ,” and then it is snapping Theo’s neck from his body, sending the two, now disconnected, parts flying in opposite directions, blood and sinew splattering across the grass.  
  
Lydia considers very seriously the possibility that whatever is left in her stomach will soon be joining the corpse in the grass, steaming in the chilly morning air. Beside her, Stiles’ face has gone dangerously sallow and Lydia knows that, despite his creative threats, there had always been a part of him unwilling to contemplate the exact details of it all, to go through with them.  
  
The beast straightens as it looks across the field toward them, its nostrils flaring. In a strange way, it reminds Lydia of the kitchen cats – the stillness about them when they have seen suitable prey: a mouse, a piece of meat left unattended. The way their muscles will slowly bunch themselves, tight and compact, before springing.  
  
“Whatever you do, don’t let it get its hands around your neck,” Scott says weakly by way of last rites, looking as ill as the rest of them, and then they are scattering as the beast charges.  
  
As the others distract the beast, Lydia hovers near an edge, desperately looks for an opening – a predictable pattern in its movements. The problem is, she thinks and clenches her fists, that she has never had much practice on a moving target.  
  
She is closing her eyes, reaching slowly past the loud, somatic anxiety that swarms over her skin, when hands are wrapping around her waist, covering her mouth and yanking her back into the cover of the trees. Lydia’s eyes fly open and she bites down hard on the hand, enough to draw blood and a muffled sound from the attacker. She grinds her heel against its foot, elbows it in the ribs before she quickly slips out from beneath him.  
  
When she turns around, the sight that greets her is so bewildering Lydia can only stare.  
  
It is to the stablehand that had lent her the horse all those weeks ago. His skin is sallow and hanging, the dark circles beneath his eyes near indistinguishable from bruises. He stares back at her with wild, shuttered eyes and _my god,_ she is thinking then, because she has seen this same pair of eyes staring at her from across the central square.  
  
“Wha – _why_ – ” she croaks out, and he is lifting his right hand to show her the bandages wrapped around it, says, low and gravelly, “You couldn’t kill me with that. I’m no chimera. Just a simple bondservant, whom Master Theo was kind enough to take under his wing.”  
  
Lydia thinks of the whispers in the castle, the fear and suspicion permeating through the corridors, and almost wants to laugh because, in the end, it was not poison in her tea by those below stairs nor some assassin sent by an elder above, but a stablehand.  
  
This stablehand must see the understanding in her eyes because the deadened look in his eyes abruptly changes to fury and he is moving forward and barring his forearm so forcefully against her barely healing neck that, for a terrifying moment, she sees nothing but stars. He pushes her up against a nearby tree, ripping off her messenger bag and throwing it aside so he can crowd closer. His other hand covers her mouth, and how could she have not recognized him sooner – that sour, bitter stench emanating from his skin and breath. _Death imminent._  
  
“You know nothing about me, Lydia of Martin,” he hisses. “But I know _everything_ about you. How,” he says, “is this any kind of a relationship?”  
  
She struggles to swallow against the arm crushing her windpipe, wants to say, _simple, this_ is _no relationship,_ but then he is leaning even closer, stroking her hair with the tips of his fingers and saying, “Shall I educate you, my little pet?” and over his shoulder, Lydia can see the blurred outline of something dark and viscous forming from the earth, pooling on the underside of the tree branches.  
  
The man says, “It – you – make me so _enraged_ – force me to feel so many things – sometimes I think I’ll go mad with it. I know it’s because you like to deliberately tease me. How else can you remain as oblivious as you are?”  
  
“Open your eyes, Lydia,” he orders then, his fingernails now digging into the side of her face, forcing her to look his way. “If you address me – silently or aloud – as a mere stablehand _one more time_ – ”  
  
_Oh,_ she thinks, because at this angle – their faces so close – there is something deeper than just the wildness of his eyes. Running beneath that veneer is an unsettling vacancy.  
  
_Oh,_ and she is reminded of hands trapping the sides of her face, the animalistic panic that had reared its head inside her, and –   
  
_Schrader.  
_  
He sees the dawning in her eyes and shakes his head, breaches the distance between them until his hand is the only thing separating her mouth from his. “Close, so close,” he says. “But not enough. I am so much _more_. I was the one who led Valack to you. I was the one who let Theo into the stronghold. I was the one who planned his exhibition in central square, who fed him ideas, who trusted him to return only one favor for all of my efforts. Me. _Me._ _Look only at me._ ”  
  
Schrader continues to mumble, “Only at me. Only me. You belong to only me. That was the deal, wasn’t it? The king and his pack, for you. He would keep the king’s head and I would keep the scribe’s, and I would keep _you_.”  
  
“But of course, in the end, he failed me as Valack did. Ah, _Lydia,_ you must think me foolish – always putting my trust into others. You can never trust anyone beyond yourself, can you?” and these words are some twisted variation of grandmother’s words, breathed hot and acrid through the space between Schrader’s fingers. “I’ve learned, Lydia. I was wrong, but no more. _No,_ ” he pants, “ _more._ I’ll have to finish the task myself.”  
  
_What task?_ a part of her thinks, even as fear and horror bloom, crashing over her, because she knows as surely as she sees the imprints of death scattering now across the forest floor and trees – imprints she has only ever seen in her dreams, the void. A living, breathing manifestation of every nightmare she has ever had since she was eight years of age.  
  
_Oh, God,_ she is begging earnestly then, struggling valiantly in Schrader’s grasp, _oh merciful God, no._ Oh no, no, and a scream breaks loose from her then, reckless and desperate and loud enough to throw him away from her, loud enough to shatter the branches around them.  
  
“ _Lydia!_ ” she hears in the distance, alarmed – _oh god, no, no_ – and she is screaming “Stiles! Stiles, _don’t come!_ ” but this time she is the one calling out to him from below the balcony, knowing that her words will only fall on ears deafened by that ever-incessant need to stick one’s nose in and help.  
  
A choked, guttural sob breaks loose from her. From where he has fallen, Schrader slowly struggles to rise, and there are two fingers missing from the hand that had covered her mouth but he only laughs indulgently as he observes them, says, “Scream all you want Lydia, but you cannot rid me as easily as you did Valack. Not when your good doctor has filled that hole in your head – ” Abruptly, he shifts and there is a silver knife where he stood only a second ago, the handle quivering violently against the tree bark.  
  
“Stiles,” Lydia says then, “Stiles, _go_ – ”  
  
“No, no. Why don’t you stay,” Schrader offers. “It’s impressive that you would aim for my head the first time around.”  
  
Stiles stands at the border straddling tree and clearing, says, “I’m not taking any chances this time, thanks,” but his eyes are searching Lydia’s throat, her face. Something terrible hardens in his face then, between the crevices of his brows.  
  
“Stiles, the beast,” Lydia tries again, desperate, but he is almost angry when he says, “What use am _I_ against the beast of Gevaudan? How did you get past the guards?” This last question is directed at Schrader, and Lydia understands with astonishing clarity why her stoic, unyielding grandmother would have broken in this moment – would have yelled out _leave, leave now, or you’ll surely die – don’t you understand?_  
  
Schrader smiles politely at Stiles, says, “Easily, sir.”  
  
“Good, then I won’t feel bad about having all your hard work go to waste.”  
  
“On the contrary,” the other man begins, but then a roar is sounding from the clearing, loud enough to shake the dying leaves from the trees surrounding them. The ground beneath them shudders in the same breath.  
  
“ _Scott!_ ” Liam yells in the distance, alarmed, and Lydia flings herself at Stiles – drags him forcefully away, back into the open area, knowing that where the rest of the pack is, Schrader will not follow. He has lost too much already – he is much too afraid to lose what remains.  
  
A decision made while stuck between a rock and a hard place, Lydia cannot help but think wildly, because in the clearing, the beast is sending shockwaves with each hit, such that the others are repeatedly thrown to the ground, scrambling and heaving to even _reach_ the beast.  
  
“Give me the pike,” Liam is yelling, running around the beast and Scott. “I’ll do it – if it’s anyone, I’ll to be the one who does it – ” and Scott is dodging the beast’s swipes, yelling back, “We are _not_ leaving Mason to die, Liam!”  
  
The beast chooses that moment of distraction to wrap its claws around Scott, lifting him up by his neck, and Kira and Liam are crying out in horror – but where the beast would have ripped Scott apart like it did Theo, there is one, maybe two seconds where it pauses, staring at Scott as if startled, and this is time enough.  
  
Lydia races forward, cups her hands, screams – “ ** _MASON_** ” – feels as the wound in her throat opens completely and, in the same instant, feels the echo of her scream as a single, outgoing tide, rushing across individual blades of grass toward Scott and the beast, void and earth melding impossibly into one, transitory plane. She watches as the ripples of her cry slam into the hard, corporeal line of the beast – as it foams pure and good around the body, as every part the wave touches washes away into beautiful, smooth flesh. The dark remnants of the beast blow away like one would separate chaff from wheat, until there are two figures: one, a shivering, fainting boy where the beast once stood and, two, a new whirlwind of black, immaterial dust that looms larger than ever. A third figure appears then – another boy, immaterializing from thin air, who gently catches the first as he falls.  
  
“ _Mason!_ ” someone, most likely Liam, shouts. But then ominous cobalt eyes are appearing in the dark funnel of smoke and Scott is backing away slowly, saying, “Um, all right. _This_ is where we use the pike, I think,” and Lydia is turning to Stiles, about to ask without words _did you see_ –  
  
Every breath in her body dies.  
  
A silver-tipped arrow protrudes from Stiles’ chest, right where her words would be if she were to uncover his shirt, right above his heart, and suddenly it is as if Lydia is in one of her visions. The world comes into sharp, almost nauseating focus around her and she finds herself thinking, oh, I recognize the distribution of dirt and grass beneath us – how there is a daisy crushed underfoot; yes, there – Lydia looks up, sees the patterns of the passing clouds and the moon half-awake in the morning sky – the smell of blood and smoke all around them –  
  
Wake up now, Lydia.  
  
Wake up –  
  
“Your neck wound’s reopened,” Stiles tells her, matter-of-factly, _worriedly_ , and then he is falling.  
  
If Lydia had looked behind her in this instant, she would have seen many things: Kira, lacing lightning around the smoke creature in an intricate web. Scott, who leaps toward the beast, pike raised to strike, his teeth bared and red eyes glowing. Malia, with her claws and teeth at the ready in case anything goes wrong, and Liam already rushing to where his friend lies motionless on the ground.  
  
But Lydia does not look back. She looks forward instead, down to where her soulmate is dying in the dirt and grass so familiar hadn’t she memorized it in her _dreams_ , and something deep within her is shattering – _oh,_ she thinks hysterically. It may just be her knees against the ground.  
  
She crawls to him, pats his cheeks, his forehead, everywhere she can reach, her hands shaking so badly she can hardly keep her balance. “Stiles,” she says, because she had willingly chose not to talk in that first month she knew him, when her voice had been whole but her spirit broken, and now that her throat is mangled, she has never wanted to speak to him so much in her life. “Stiles, _Stiles._ ”  
  
_Stiles,_ she wants to say, _don’t go._  
  
_Stiles, stay. Please – I’m so sorry. I tried so, so hard but it wasn’t enough. Why couldn’t it have been enough?  
  
Stiles, I’ve never regretted you. I’ve only ever regretted that I saw how it would end. But I’ve never regretted you – oh god, not once.  
_  
A terrible sound is compressing the air around her – heaving and sobbing – and she knows in a distant, detached way that it must be coming from her. _Stiles,_ she tries to say, but nothing comes out besides a small, muffled keen.  
  
“Hey, hey,” Stiles is saying then, patient and lucid even now when blood is bubbling at the corners of his mouth, and she feels his hand touch her temple, the wetness of her cheeks and she can hardly see him through the blurriness but she has to see, she _has to see_. “ _I’m_ the one dying, here.”  
  
“Don’t – _stop,_ ” she begs him in harsh gasps, pressing her fists against his chest in an act of defiance. Her own blood drips down onto him from her mouth, her throat, and everything is red, red, because it doesn’t make sense and she thinks that the story is complete but it has also ended. Thinks, would it have been worse if she had told him his fate? Could this have ended any other way?  
  
Stiles is loquacious even with the audible rush of blood filling his lungs, coughing red from his mouth, and Lydia wants to shout at him to _stop talking - stop time - stop -_  “Stop what? Going? It’ll be all right, Lydia.”  
  
“Of course everything will be all right,” Lydia snaps out, adamant and unreasonable and terribly, terribly terrified. She does not care if the beast has been defeated or not – does not care about anything except for this boy bleeding out beneath her – and she is turning to the others, screams past the burning in her throat, “ _Help! Please!_ Oh, god, please, _please_ – ”  
  
Stiles has his head turned to a side, his eyes clouding and sharpening at odd intervals as he watches the rest of the pack. He shushes her gently, says, “They’re doing something very important right now – oh wait, no. Scott’s seen us.”  
  
He gives a small spasm then, his hand reflexively reaching toward his wound, blood spurting thick and dark from his mouth. When his eyes begin clouding over again Lydia gives him a shake, says, “Stiles! You’re not allowed to go – not until you – you introduce me to your father – and we’ll go to Reyes again and I’ll buy _every single_ one of those masks so you can break them – _Stiles –_ ”  
  
And then Stiles is saying, “You think I’m going with regrets? If only I hadn’t met Scott and the others, if only you weren’t my soulmate. Mercy, Lydia, I would have had the most unfulfilling life. Oh, hey Scott,” because Scott is dropping to his knees beside Lydia, the whites of his eyes lined with horror.  
  
“Stiles,” the king says. “ _Stiles_ – ”  
  
“Ye-p,” Stiles says, slow and sloppy now, “that’s my name – that’s my name, and I forbid you from using anything otherwise at the wake – ”  
  
Lydia will not remember anything from this exchange, from Stiles’ final wish. All she will remember is this: his blood caking beneath her hands, the smell of smoke and death in the air around them, him saying, _If only you weren’t my soulmate_. She will remember the confusion and bewilderment and disbelief that soars through her, unable to breathe – too desperate to believe just yet.  
  
Now, she feels the rising of black, globular death, the setting of her stomach, and Allison who reminds her, _not with words but choices, Lydia_ , and Lydia is scrambling to her feet because choices had taken her this far, and so she is thinking _my bag – where is my bag –_ and then she is remembering Schrader pushing her against the tree and tossing it aside, and suddenly she finds herself sprinting across the clearing, mud and grass flaking from her knees.  
  
The trees where Schrader had abducted her is deathly silent now, eerie even, but Lydia does not care – cannot hear anything past the ringing in her ears, the sickening, terrifying hope coursing through her until she is feverish and cold all at once. Hope that is much too fragile to thrive in this narrative, because Lydia’s bag, when she yanks it open with hands trembling, is empty.  
  
Schrader’s voice rings out, muted and somehow incredibly loud, “There’s nothing left,” and, slowly, Lydia is lifting her eyes to fix upon him.  
  
He regards her with wide, solemn eyes from where he is standing at the edge of the woods, says, “I couldn’t take any more chances, now could I?” and then Lydia is screaming, _screaming_ – because, like clockwork, like it had been in the square, like fate snipping with abhorred shears _,_ three things happen at once:  
  
In Schrader’s hand is a bow, loose and slick with death made viscous. Beneath his foot are the crushed remains of Lydia’s herbs – mountain ash, wolfsbane, lavender, lucerne and yarrow – and even as she is beginning to scream, the third occurrence has already finished:  
  
Stiles _– her Stiles_ – has stopped breathing.

 

* * *

  
  
Lydia does not know how she stumbles back out into the clearing, only knows that she had felt only coldness as she watched Schrader melt before her, organs and burnt flesh puddling onto the ground. That she had to stop twice to heave the contents of her stomach into the grass, that when she arrives, the others have crowded around his body – like _flies_ , she thinks bitterly, and wants to push them back, wanted to scream _how could they_ when his body was still warm.

In her absence, they have broken the shaft from his body and Scott is keening low and muffled into his friend’s shirt. Lydia does not know when or how she drew close enough to count the freckles spanning Stiles’ face, to hear the absence of breath coming from his slightly parted mouth. She only knows the feeling of his still-warm cheek that curves perfectly in her palm, of her lungs collapsing into a dark, nebulous ocean, her heart being ripped into a million, irreparable shreds –

“ _Lightning_ – ” she is gasping out then, remembering. The others turn to look at her and Scott’s expression is that of a man lost in the desert, shuttered and losing strength.

“Lightning,” she says again, louder. The words tumble from her, desperate, “Lightning – I read it in Deaton's encyclopedia - it restarted a man’s heart – _his heart_ – ”

“Light – ” Kira repeats numbly, before her eyes widen. She points at herself. “ _Me,_ lightning?”

Lydia’s mind is whirling now in a desperate bid to think of anything but the unnatural stillness of the boy beneath her hands, _her_ boy. There is a boulder lodged in her neck, a whirlpool that is widening with every breath, until she can hardly force the words out. “A shock. The book said a jolt hard enough to restart a person’s system. Straight into the heart. The recorded account happened by accident – the man was caught in a thunderstorm, and he was both killed and brought back to life by a lightning bolt. _Kira._ ”

The Fox blanches even more than she has already. “Lydia, I – ” she begins, and it is as if she is almost about to say, _I can’t do it_. But it is whatever expression she glimpses on Lydia and Scott’s faces that is enough for her to close her mouth, to lick her lips before saying, “Straight into the heart?”

She is then pushing the others away with the help of Malia, saying, “Stand back,” with sweat trickling down her nervous, paled face. “I-I don’t know if it will work – just – stand back – _farther,_ Lydia – Scott, hold her – ”

And as they watch in silenced, unanimous horror, Kira rubs her hands together until a spark is spreading across her hands, and then – quicker than anyone can stop her – she reaches out, pumps both fists against Stiles’ chest. There is a violent shudder that emanates from Stiles’ body, one that has Lydia pulling against Scott’s hold, then nothing.  
  
“Uh,” Kira grunts out, and there is a greenish tint to her pallor now, a fine trembling to her frame. “Oh. God. Maybe – if I try aga – ”

Stiles’ eyes open in the same moment he gives a startled inhale sharp enough to almost be a shout.  
  
From above him, Kira lets out a small scream, covers her face, and bursts into tears, and Malia quickly ushers her to a side, one arm wrapped around her. Lydia is breaking free from Scott then, is tripping over thin air and the earth itself to crawl her way to her soulmate’s side.  
  
Stiles lies unmoving save for the tiny, occasional hitch of his chest, and the constellations on his face stand harshly against a waxlike complexion. Lydia is too afraid to move, too afraid to blink – too afraid to speak – as if the heavens will think her too greedy, will know just how much she needs him and will have no choice but to take him away from her again.  
  
Stiles must feel a shadow looming over him because a small, familiar frown creases in the space between his eyebrows and then he is opening one eye, just barely. For one horrible moment, he looks at her as if he does not recognize her – and she is about to fade, about to be sick – but then he is croaking out, “Lyd, I think it’s snowing. Or dandruff,” and this time it is Lydia who bursts into tears.

 

* * *

  
  
“Three times. Thrice, you’ve saved my life now,” he tells her later, when they are trundling back up the hills toward the capital. Both he and Mason have been placed on the back of horses – the latter still remaining unconscious, the former having insisted on Roscoe – “You are a _terrible_ patient,” Scott had muttered – and every time Stiles opens her mouth to complain some more, Lydia feels a large piece of her heart lightening like the harvest moon, the words across her hip aching in the best of ways.  
  
Now, still unable to stop smiling or crying, she points out to him, “Kira did, technically.”  
  
“No,” Stiles says then, and she watches as a white speckle drifts down onto his lashes. “In the fog, it was your thread I followed back,” his fingers reaching out to touch the wildness that must be her hair, and Lydia cannot possibly grow any warmer, is full enough to burst at the seams. It is in this instant that she truly understands what had separated her fate from her legacy: a girl with shining dark hair and the most envious of dimples when she smiled, who had barged into Lydia’s home and heart and would not take _no_ for an answer. Because Lydia’s grandmother had taught her to shut herself from the world, but Allison had taught her how to let others in.  
  
Now, Lydia lifts her eyes from Stiles onto Kira and Malia, both of whom had unabashedly offered Stiles a backride when Roscoe initially could not be located, to Liam, whose eyes are wet and rimmed an unrepentant red – to Scott, who walks barefoot through the grass, his back straight and sure, leading them home.  
  
Lydia lifts her eyes as around them, hushed and beautiful, the first snow begins to fall.

 

* * *

  
  
_A –  
  
It has already been one year since you left. I know, because with every sunrise I lament one more day without you by my side.  
  
I am also ensuring that any poor soul who sneaks a glance at the first few lines of your letters will think you are keeping a lover to the side. I suppose I won’t deny the status if accused; I do seem to fit the clothes rather well. Scorned and repressed, sent far away to live in some trodden village, longing for letters that will never arrive.  
  
After all, as of today, more than two months have passed since I was last promised to hear from you, Mistress Allison. Have you forgotten about me? Pray tell the big city has not sunk its talons into you, with all its newfangled notions and caprices – or the solicitations coming from very particular persons…_

 _Ah, the desire to pen a letter to the wolfenking himself grows more tempting with each passing day, although can you imagine: a letter from some village wench, crying hysterically and accusing His Majesty the king of stealing her best friend. If anything, they’d dispatch of me in the night and then who would be sending you your supply of decent honey and terrible biscuits?  
  
Drivel aside, you are well aware that you needn’t reply in any haste. Truly, if you  dare burn any midnight oil on my behalf, I will smell wax on the parchment like a bloodhound and I will_ _journey to the capital – at the expense of the cats and garden, so help us all. At this point, only the heavens know how any of them are still alive in your continued absence.  
  
Allison, more important than any letter to be received is this: Are you well? Have you been eating enough? I’ve sent a small vial of lavender alongside this letter; massage it in when there is trouble with sleep or aches. Ah, Alli, Alli. My only solace these past months is that I have not had any visions of you lying facedown in a ditch, somewhere.  
  
...Mercy, Alli. I wouldn't know what to do if you were to become injured – or worse. Curl up and fade, most likely.  
  
If nothing else, promise me that you will take care of yourself. Promise me you will remember to rest when you are tired, to cry when you are sad, to eat something other than those hard biscuits for god’s sake. Promise me you will remember that, regardless of what happens, you are and will always be wholly loved – even if it is by a village wench a thousand miles away.  
  
You alone are, unabashedly, my everything.  
  
Love,  
L  
_

 

* * *

 

 **XII. Kaus**  
_The winds will blow_  
_The seasons will change_  
_Gains and losses chasing the other in a circle_  
_But as constant as the stars in the firmament,_  
_So I will return to stay at your side_

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> IF YOU'VE READ THIS FAR - THANK YOU SO MUCH! ♥ everyone in the stydia fandom is so great and it's been an absolute honor being able to contribute to this amazing community of people!
> 
>  **a few notes:**  
>  ► _[naturalis historia]()_ is a real life encyclopedia that had been compiled by Pliny the Elder many, many moons ago. i did not use any actual material within it - instead, as always, i butchered it terribly for my own use. thanks and sorry, Pliny!  
>  ► likewise, _[Mercurialis perennis]()_ is an actual plant whose properties i have ruthlessly distorted for the sake of this story. again, many thanks and apologies are proffered.  
>  ► the "grace weather" mentioned is based heavily on the californian [santa ana winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds) in terms of season, general description, and the (fascinating, imho) urban lore surrounding it!  
> ► titles for the different vignettes are from the brightest stars of the zodiac constellations, starting from capricorn; they were written by an unknown poet from the kingdom long ago, a retelling of the sun and moon mythos. aka i just made them up whoops.
> 
> aaah, again - thank you so much for reading!!!


End file.
